ADDRESSING CHALLENGES IN COMPREHENDING SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES FOR NON-LANGUAGE UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

In the contemporary landscape of scientific advancement, understanding research literature for higher students from various fields is crucial. Nevertheless, non-language undergraduate psychology students frequently encounter specific obstacles when dealing with the literature in their professionally oriented field because of the journal articles’ format, their unfamiliar structure, complex terminology, and lexical peculiarities commonly found in scientific writings. The authors investigate the most frequently met challenges, such as psychological, cognitive, and linguistic, usually faced by students for whom English is a foreign language. Among psychological problems, the authors identify a fear of approaching a research article in the English language, an anxiety about misunderstanding its gist, fear of processing the text and performing some further activities based on the content. The article suggests some methods to prevent psychological problems at the pre-reading stage and raise students’ motivation to approach the passage of scientific discourse, proposing the reading strategies to upgrade the ability for comprehension. An important role in improving students’ confidence is played by applying the interdisciplinary approach, a scrupulous selection of the assigned articles, learners’ background knowledge, and the reading competencies that have already been acquired during the professionally oriented English lessons. The article proposes some teaching strategies for each stage of the reading lesson: pre-reading, while-reading, and post-reading. The application of these strategies increases the student’s ability to overcome challenges in comprehending passages of scientific discourse and make use of the most important information in their further learning activities.