Comprehension Breakdown and Regulatory Strategies in Academic Reading: A Think-Aloud Case Study of University Students in Kupang, Indonesia

Academic reading is central to the performance of higher education students, but how students manage difficulties in reading comprehension remains under-researched. This study examined the comprehension breakdown and regulatory strategies that students verbalized during reading, focusing on strategies readers use to restore understanding and increase comprehension. Nine second-semester university students in Kupang, Indonesia, were involved in a think-aloud reading task followed by stimulated recall interviews. The results showed that academic reading unfolded in several episodes rather than as a smooth linear process when they found difficult technical terms, abbreviations, abstract conceptual labels, and underspecified evidential claims. Three main strategies to achieve comprehension were repair chains, concretization bridges to recover abstract meaning, and the application of meaning monitoring or epistemic monitoring. Across cases, participants varied in the density and depth of regulatory strategies; some produced longer, less stable episodes, while others often recovered meaning through glossing, paraphrasing, inference, and evaluative monitoring.