A study of the English reading comprehension strategies utilised by level-one students at the University of Venda

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the English reading strategies utilised by level-one students at the University of Venda. The respondents in this study were three hundred and nine level-one students from various Schools in the University of Venda who were doing English Communication Skills (ECS) course in the 2016 academic year. The study adopted a mixed methods research design (quantitative and qualitative research approaches). Data were collected by means of a self-completion questionnaire of the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) developed by Mokhtari and Sheorey. The researcher employed descriptive statistics to analyse frequency use of each reading strategy using frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and usage level. Open-ended data were summarised by using grouping technique. The results of the study revealed that the participants in this study were, to a large extent, aware of what they were doing when reading as they reported utilising English reading strategies with different frequencies and with the high and moderate levels of reading strategy usage. The highest mean frequency with which the respondents used a given category of strategies when reading English academic materials was 3.98 (high) which was derived from the category of problem-solving strategies, while the category of support reading strategies and global reading strategies were reported being used with the relative mean of 3.79 (high) and 3.57 (high) respectively. The findings can be helpful to students in increasing their awareness of reading strategies while reading, improving their understanding of the reading process, and enhancing confidence in their own reading ability and to teachers and lecturers in helping their students learn to become constructively responsive and thoughtful readers, which will promote academic reading skills and ultimately enhance academic achievement.