INVESTIGATING FACTORS AFFECTING READING COMPREHENSION, PERCEPTIONS OF READING TASK-TYPES AND STRATEGIES

To Thi Ngoc Huyen, Khau Hoang Anh

Abstract


Reading can be a crucial skill in studying a language as it helps record a plethora of knowledge in the world. Reading can be an entertaining activity or it can be a task. This study aims at investigating the task as this is commonly seen in studying a language. More specifically, the study targets three different objectives and 30 first-year English majors were recruited to answer the survey questions. They were asked about the factors that they thought to have the greatest effects on reading comprehension. The second section asked them about their opinion about difficult reading comprehension task-types. The third section elicited their opinion about reading comprehension strategies which they thought to be difficult to apply in doing comprehension tasks. The results revealed that most of the participants posited that they had obstacles in vocabulary, grammatical structures and unfamiliarity of the topic and vocabulary was seen as the most problematic. Then, grammatical structures were seen as the second most difficult. Furthermore, they thought that true/false questions, sentence completion questions; tasks like summary/table completion; and multiple-choice questions hindered them from understanding the reading comprehension tasks. Next, guessing the meaning from the context was found to be the most difficult strategy while spotting the specific information to answer the questions was seen as the second difficulty. Some limitations of the study were also concluded.

 

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Keywords


reading comprehension, factors, reading comprehension task-types, reading comprehension strategies

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejfl.v6i1.4178

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