Reading Strategies in Non-Linguistic Students: Frequency Analysis

Non-linguistic university students need effective ESL reading strategies. The study involved 100 students (19–20 y.o.) of the Institute of Art and Design, Izhevsk, Russia, 57 of whom had obvious ESL reading issues. Prior to the experiment, the students used two reading strategies: monitoring and summarizing. E. K. McEwan identified the following reading strategies: knowledge activation, inference, monitoring, question generation, information retrieval, summarization, and visualization. When these reading strategies were introduced into ESL classes, the students preferred monitoring, interference, and knowledge activation. In the monitoring strategy, they marked hints in the text, underlined information, adjusted their reading speed, scrolled the text before reading, and asked questions while reading. When using the strategy of inference, the students read complex passages aloud, made notes, underlined important information, and considered the text structure. They used knowledge activation strategy by reading slowly and analyzing; they used pre-reading review and concentrated on the task at hand. The least popular strategies involved generating questions, information retrieval, summarizing, and visualization. The prevailing reading strategy probably was acquired at school. The least popular reading strategies identified in this study need more attention in class.