Strategy Use for Reading English for General and Specific Academic Purposes in Testing and Nontesting Contexts

Abstract

Language‐use strategies are considered potentially effective approaches that learners select to accomplish a second‐ or foreign‐language task. In the past three decades, there has been a proliferation of research concerned with learners' strategy use at different levels of language ability and the influence of L1 learner strategies on L2 language learning. The present study, however, looked at an underresearched topic: what strategies EFL learners adopted to read two types of articles (general and subject‐specific) in both testing and nontesting contexts. Ninety‐two Chinese‐major university students taking a Journalistic English course participated in the study. Questionnaires with follow‐up interviews, and retrospective self‐reports were employed. The results showed that the participants used similar strategies but to different degrees while reading general and subject‐specific articles and taking reading comprehension tests. Also, the participants' comprehension of the two types of reading genres in testing and nontesting situations was, in part, determined by their information‐processing stages and accessibility of schemata. When attempts to use cognitive strategies failed, strategies for monitoring, regulating, and managing information were adopted to compensate for the incomprehension of articles. The findings suggest that effective teaching for intermediate university‐level EFL students like the sample group should encompass a combination of subject‐specific language and content reinforcement followed by strategic reading instruction using subject‐specific articles.

Modelling the Relationship among Prior English Level, Self-efficacy, Critical Thinking, and Strategies in Reading Performance

“…Those who used more metacognitive and cognitive strategies tended to receive higher reading scores in English classes. A number of studies have shown the benefits of using reading strategies to enhance learning outcomes (Chou, 2013;Cohen, 2007;Denton et al, 2015;Oxford, 2011). Nonetheless, researchers have argued that rote memorization discourages self-regulation if this is the only type of strategy adopted by language learners; hence, relying too heavily on memory strategies can impair students' cognitive ability to interrelate concepts (Holschuh & Aultman, 2008;Oxford, 2011;Vansteenkiste et al, 2004).…”

“…Reading ability, grammar drills and vocabulary memorization are highly emphasized in high school English classrooms because the English test content of the University Entrance Examination (UEE) consists mainly of grammar and vocabulary tests, reading comprehension tests, and Chinese-English translation (Chou, 2015(Chou, , 2017. The development of reading skills has a central place in secondary English education in Taiwan.Over the last few decades, research has seen a dramatic increase in the number of studies on learning strategies and their relationship with reading proficiency (Hosenfeld, 1977;O'Malley & Chamot, 1990), the impact of L1 on L2 strategy use (Hardin, 2001;Jiménez, García, & Pearson, 1996), the influence of nonlinguistic variables such as culture and motivation on strategy use (Greaney & Neuman, 1990;Jia, Gottardo, Koh, Chen, & Pasquarella, 2014), strategy-based instruction (SBI) in language classrooms (Dreyer & Nel, 2003;Montero, Newmaster, & Ledger, 2014), strategy use in different reading contexts (Chou, 2013;Cohen, 1998), and text characteristics in language teaching and learning (de Leeuw, Segers, & Verhoeven, 2016;Roman, Jones, Basaraba, & Hironaka, 2016). In studying self-efficacy, first, most previous research has focused on the extent to which self-efficacious learners adopt self-regulated strategies to solve problems and improve test performance in relation to general academic learning.…”

The Influence of Topics on Listening Strategy Use for English for Academic Purposes

“…In the present listening study, test wiseness strategies were more frequently adopted by the participants. In the case of taking ESAP reading tests, nevertheless, similar EFL undergraduate learners tended to resort to metacognitive strategies more frequently (Chou, 2013). Unlike with reading tests, one student specifically indicated that taking listening tests required them to catch known words heard in the fast and transient speech and make judgments or inferences based on them making it impossible to remember or review the whole sentences.…”

“…One of the most fruitful areas of listening strategy research has been in cognitive nature of listening and listening in communication; however, L2 listening still remains the least researched compared with the other three language skills (Flowerdew & Miller, 2005;Lynch, 2011;Vandergrift, 2006). In recent years, as English for academic (EAP) and/or specific purposes (ESP) courses has become increasingly prevalent and important in FL contexts at tertiary level where English is used as the language for instruction (Chou, 2011;Chou, 2013;Hyland, 2006), listening to English for academic purposes (EAP), or more specifically, English for general/specific academic purposes (EGAP/ESAP), has been increasingly recognized as essential for university students. While much of linguistic processing (such as recognition of words and syntactic parsing) of first language users is automated, L2 and FL learners, who lack linguistic and content knowledge, need to work out the meaning of words and sentences under the constraints of limited working memory for listening (Faerch & Kasper, 1986;Goh, 2002).…”

“…To date, research on test-taking strategies have mostly been explored with reading comprehension tests using different types of test techniques (Cohen, 1998;Cohen, 2006) or reading materials (Chou, 2013), and test-taking strategies for listening remain relatively under-researched (Field, 2013). As a result, the purposes of the present study were to examine what listening strategies were adopted by EFL university students to comprehend two types of academic English (i.e., EGAP and ESAP) and the effectiveness of strategy use in association with the listening processes in the two contexts.…”