Reading Strategies in Foreign Language Academic Reading: A Qualitative Investigation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate how EFL undergraduate students do to improve their reading comprehension, solve the problems encountered while reading, and overcome comprehension failures. This paper presents a qualitative investigation designed to provide a clear picture of the strategies used by those students in their academic reading. A semi-structured interview served as the main source of data. Thirty-nine students from four different government universities participated in the study. The transcribed interview data was analyzed with 'open and axial coding' techniques. The data analyses revealed two main emergent categories of reading strategies: 1) strategies for comprehending reading texts (SCT); and 2) strategies for enhancing textual comprehension (SETC) with altogether 39 individual reading strategies. The implications of the findings for language teaching and learning are discussed.