Supporting B.C.’s expanding international education: The efficacy of academic reading strategy instruction among adult English-as-an-additional-language students

The enrolment of international students at Canadian institutions of higher learning has tripled to 318,153 in 2018/2019 from 101,304 in 2008/2009 (Statistics Canada, 2020). Similarly, the number of international students in B.C.’s post-secondary institutions has significantly risen (BC Council on Admissions & Transfer, 2019). A significant proportion of these international students for whom English is an additional language first encounter Canadian higher education through their enrolment in English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) programs, which prepare students for English-language coursework and offer a path for enrolment at Canadian institutions without an institution’s required documentation of English language proficiency. For international English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) students who initially enrol in EAP programs in order to later pursue higher studies in Canada, reading a variety of academic texts can be challenging, since reading comprehension “involves the ability to integrate various sources of information in order to construct” meaning (Li & D’Angelo, 2016, p. 159). To facilitate reading comprehension, second language (L2) researchers have identified a variety of reading strategies, and extensive research has been conducted to examine the efficacy of reading strategy instruction. However, the research on the effect of reading strategy instruction remains inconclusive due to the interplay of various contextual and individual variables (e.g., Cohen, 2011; Plonsky, 2011). This study reports a mixed methods-action research project involving 52 intermediate-level EAP students conducted to investigate the efficacy of L2 reading strategy instruction at a post-secondary institution in Canada. Implemented through five phases: diagnosing, reconnoitering, planning, acting, and evaluation (Ivankova, 2015), the study used Mokhtari and Sheorey’s (2002) Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) to capture the participants’ reading strategy use and a standardized reading comprehension test to measure the participants’ reading comprehension abilities. Further, participants’ weekly post-task verbal reflections and post-intervention interviews provided qualitative data about learners’ use of reading strategies over time. Through both qualitative (i.e., content analysis) and quantitative data analyses (i.e., descriptive statistics, paired-sample t-test, Pearson’s correlation, and MANOVA tests), the results showed higher awareness and use of reading strategies and reading performance among the participants after the intervention. In strategy use and reading comprehension, the experimental groups that received reading strategy instruction outperformed the comparison group that simply received regular instruction on reading with no instruction on strategy use. Statistically significant correlations were found between participants’ overall strategy use and reading performance. The analysis of the qualitative data revealed that the participants used a wide variety of global, problem-solving, and support reading strategies depending on reading academic texts in English.

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