Thai vocational students' use of reading strategies in learning english

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the use of English language reading strategies among vocational students at a vocational college in Thailand and its findings are hoped to improve the English reading instruction of Thailand’s vocational education. Data collected for the present research reveals different typologies of reading strategies adopted by low and high English proficient students in the sample studied, illuminating how they utilized these strategies differently. During the first phase of data collection, quantitative data were collected from the sample researched by means of the survey questionnaire. A total number of 162 participants consented to take part in the study, but only 121 returned their responses to the questionnaire (note that the sample consisted of first-year post-secondary students in the academic year of 2013-2014). During the second phase of data collection, think-aloud sessions and interviews were conducted to elicit data from a smaller sample of 18 participants (out of 24 students), which consisted of nine higher English proficient students and nine lower English proficient students. Of these 24 students, the six participants failed to provide valid data.

The research results showed that Thai vocational students’ utilizations of reading strategies occurred before, during and after their respective reading tasks. It was evident from the findings derived from the quantitative data that all the students in the sample studied (including both low and high English proficient students) adopted all six subscales of strategies (but with a moderate frequency of overall use). In particular, they employed cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies respectively. Retrieval strategies and memory strategies were the most often employed reading strategies, whereas monitoring strategies were the least frequently adopted reading strategy.

However, it was surprising to see that the typologies (categories) of reading strategies utilized among and across students of higher and lower English proficiency levels were similar except the employment of retrieval strategies. There was no significant difference (at the confidence level of 0.05) in the overall use of reading strategies between the higher and lower English proficient vocational students, excluding retrieval strategies that were employed more frequently by higher English proficient students studied than those with lower English proficiency. Unsurprisingly, the high proficient students utilized almost all subscales of strategies (excluding memories strategies) more frequently than their low English proficient counterparts. Qualitative data also revealed that both high and low English proficient students researched adopted similar reading strategies while reading academic texts, although the strategies employed were not completely the same. The low English proficient students studied were evidently not able to apply a number of reading strategies to the full potential.

As this paper was produced as a pilot project on the type of English reading instruction, it would be more interesting to conduct further study in different vocational levels and others programs of vocational education, and also dissimilar range of genres and modalities of the research material.