An investigation into the effects of disciplinespecific background knowledge, proficiency and genre on reading comprehension and strategies of Malaysian ESP students

Abstract

This study investigates the reading comprehension and strategies of Malaysian students within the context of ESP. It seeks to examine the interplay between discipline-specific background knowledge, proficiency and genre with reading comprehension and strategy use by ESP students. The subjects involved 50 second year students studying in Mechanical Engineering and Management discipline areas in the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. These subjects were from two English proficiency groups, namely High and Intermediate level. All the subjects were required to read a total of four texts; two from two discipline areas, Mechanical Engineering and Management, and two from two genres, textbook and encyclopaedia. The study employed two main instruments, namely: think aloud protocols and verbal recall protocols. A questionnaire was also used to elicit information concerning background information of the subjects and their perceptions of the texts. Students were required to read all four texts and to produce concurrent think-aloud protocols which were later coded according to the categorisation scheme of twenty-four strategy types. The recalls produced of the reading texts were analysed in terms of idea units using a scheme to account for the preservation and transformation of meaning from source to recall text. Quantitative analyses using Univariate Analysis of Variance and Pearson Correlation were conducted. Furthermore, closer examination of data from four individuals (from both discipline and proficiency groups) was also conducted. Results from the recall data suggest a significant difference between the subjects from the two discipline groups in the production of Meaning Preserving idea units, but not Meaning Transforming idea units. A similar difference is recorded in the production of these idea units between the High and Intermediate subjects, with the High level subjects producing more of both categories of idea units. In terms of genre, no significant difference was observed in recall of the texts from textbook and encyclopaedia. Analysis of the think-aloud protocols from the two discipline subjects shows no significant difference in the number of strategies and strategy types. However, a significant difference is recorded between the proficiency levels in both the frequency of strategies and the range of strategy used, with the High level subjects tending to use more strategies and strategy types than the Intermediate level subjects. In terms of genre, no significant difference is observed for both number of strategies and strategy types. Further analyses of the likely association between recall and strategy use revealed a significant relationship between the preservation of meaning in the recall and the occurrence of frequent strategies. However, there were no significant relationships between Meaning Preserving idea units and strategy types, Meaning Transforming idea units and strategies, and Meaning Transforming idea units and strategy types. The cases of four individual subjects (Ying, Chee, Lily and Nor) were also considered in terms of the basis of strategy use (text-based or background knowledgebased), scope and grammatical nature of the source text on which the strategies were drawn (word/phrase or clause/sentence level), the number and range of strategies (limited-strategy or multi-strategy sequences) and the relationship between the strategies and the idea units. Overall, results show that the subjects used more textbased than background knowledge-based strategies. The High level subjects, Ying and Lily, however, tended to use more of both text-based and background knowledgebased strategies than the Intermediate subjects, Chee and Nor. Furthermore, all the subjects used more strategies prompted by clause/sentence level than word/phrase level unit of the texts. In terms of strategy sequences, the High level subjects used more multi-strategy sequences and the Intermediate subjects used more limitedstrategy sequences. Mixed results are observed in the relationship between the verbal recalls and strategies of all the subjects. In sum, subjects appeared to comprehend within-discipline texts better than outside-discipline texts. No difference is observed between subjects from the two discipline groups in their strategies use. Furthermore, the High level subjects tended to produce more idea units in their recalls and to employ more strategies than the Intermediate subjects. No difference is observed in the subjects’ performance when reading texts from the two genres. Explanations for these results in the light of the literature are discussed.