Raising students' awareness about reading strategies

Abstract

Biology students need to develop some reading abilities to have access to scientific literature related to their specialization. The present study aims at investigating the effects of explicit reading strategies instruction on Master II students’ comprehension in the department of Biology, University of Constantine 1. It is hypothesized that if the learners are made aware about the effectiveness of reading strategies, they would be able to apply them appropriately for their specific purposes. In order to test out this hypothesis, we conducted an experimental study where a control group and experimental group were selected randomly from the whole population of the students of Biology. The two groups received the same treatment as the researcher provided them with the same reading materials and ESP texts. However, the experimental group received some explicit instruction on reading strategies such as previewing, skimming, scanning, anticipating and predicting. A statistical measure called the student t-test was used for analyzing the data. This test is very helpful as it generates more reliable results that proved to be highly significant. The results of the experiment reveal that the students in the experimental group outperformed those of the control group. This indicates that providing students with explicit instruction about reading strategies and raising their awareness to a maximum would help ESP students enhance their reading comprehension