Reading Habits of the Undergraduate Level EFL Learners: A Survey

The importance of reading in learning a new language is unquestionable. Someone who wants to master a new language, s/he must read a lot in that language as reading is one of the two means of language input; the other one is listening. Reading not only helps the students to learn new words and expressions of the target language but also makes them familiar with the varieties of sentence structures and their uses in various contexts. Unfortunately, the EFL learners in Bangladesh do not usually read non-academic texts written in English like English newspapers, magazines, novels, and stories, among others. This hinders their lexical and syntactic development of the target language and consequently hampers their overall language learning process. The current study attempts to explore the reading habits of the undergraduate level EFL learners through a five-point Likert-scale survey. Ten different types of questions are set to investigate what the learners read or what they like to read in English, how much time they spend on reading English, and how much importance they give to improve their reading skills. The study finds that most of the students do not regularly read non-academic English texts. The majority of the students read them occasionally. Moreover, a considerable number of students are fond of reading non-academic English texts. Many do not even like to read their institutional textbooks in English. This indicates that the students are not really sincere about improving their reading skills. Although many different types of reading materials are available around, they do not read them to develop their reading skills. As a result, they fail to develop good reading habits in their daily lives.