First-Year Students’ EFL Reading Difficulties at a Greek Merchant Marine Academy: An Activity Theory Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores how the transition from secondary to tertiary education influences Greek marine engineering students’ EFL reading behaviors and strategies from an activity-theory perspective. Data were gathered through individual semi-structured interviews with four first-year students who struggled with reading texts in English. Findings suggest that these students experience difficulties in reading lengthy discipline-specific texts such as technical manuals due to the fact they still use the same EFL reading strategies and have the same expectations they had before entering tertiary education. From an activity theory perspective, these students’ difficulties are associated with two distinct EFL reading activity systems which have diverse goals, tools, values, and division of labour. The first system is placed within the wider Greek foreign language education context these students belonged in high school. The second, involves the system that emerged after they entered the Merchant Marine Academy as tertiary education students. These two EFL reading systems clash and create obstacles in their discipline-specific reading which in turn slows down their disciplinary socialization in the marine engineering community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".