A Review on Reading Strategies Among EFL Students: Academic Impacts, Level of Awareness, Gender and Frequently Used Reading Strategy

บทคัดย่อ

Language acquisition has consistently been linked to reading proficiency and academic performance. Authentic texts are useless when students are not capable of reading printed English text more so if comprehension fails as well. A lot has been developed in many parts of the world to enhance students’ reading ability and comprehension, specifically among speakers of other languages (EFL) yet less importance has been given to employing reading strategies to help students better understand the text.
OECD PISA has reported 1 0 countries with students’ reading ability described as deteriorating while 2 2 countries showed no improvement of the 6 4 countries tested (2012). Guria, Angel OECD General Secretary emphasized that “Children who struggle with reading and comprehension often have deficits in spoken language, more so, students with reading difficulties are much less likely to be academically engaged.” Hence, this study aims to review the students’ level of awareness of the effectiveness of employing reading strategies and their impact on academic performance, the relationship between gender and reading strategies, and the most popular reading strategies among student respondents.
The analysis showed that employing reading strategies can synchronously improve reading proficiency and comprehension and eventually enhance academic performance. Both tertiary and secondary students indeed popularly use reading strategies as their autonomous learning effort to better understand English printed texts as per the review of related literature utilized in the study, however, the level of awareness varies from low, to moderate to high in each country. Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea have high levels of awareness while Thailand manifests low awareness. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China showed moderate awareness. The findings also demonstrated that female students employ more reading strategies than their male counterparts. Furthermore, Problemsolving reading strategies were the most popular reading strategies among respondents followed by global strategies and support strategies. More importantly, employing reading strategies is more popular with secondary and tertiary students.