A study on english reading strategies employed by second year bridge and road students university of transport and communications

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1.1. Rationale
Internationally, teaching English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) has
changed tremendously over the last few decades. Most significantly, the traditional
teacher-centred approach has been replaced with the learner-centred one, which reflects a
desire to explore ways of making teaching responsive to learner needs and interests and
allowing learners to play a fuller, more active and participatory role in the day-to-day
teaching and learning processes. Inherent in this approach is a shift in the responsibilities
of both teachers and students in the foreign language classroom. No longer does the
teacher act as the centre of all instruction, controlling every aspect of the learning process.
Learners themselves now, more than ever, are sharing the responsibility for successful
language acquisition and, in doing so, are becoming less dependent on the language
teacher for meeting their own individual language learning needs. By giving students more
responsibility for their own language development, language programs are inviting learners
to become more autonomous, to diagnose some of their own learning strengths and
weaknesses and to self-direct the process of language development.
In the field of second language acquisition research, focus has been shifted away
from finding perfect teaching methodologies to investigating why some learners are very
successful in their language learning while others are not although they have made as much
effort learning the language. Several studies that have been carried out by Oxford (1990),
O’Malley and Chamot (1990) Nunan (1991), Rubin and Thompson (1994) and Cohen
(1998) have shown that one of the most important factors that distinguish successful
learners from unsuccessful ones is their learning strategies. In other words, successful
learners do use some effective learning strategies to deal with problems that emerge during
their learning process while unsuccessful ones employ inappropriate or ineffective
strategies resulting in their failure in their language learning. This finding has provoked
interests among researchers and teachers in identifying learning strategies employed by

good language learners with a view to training bad learners to use such effective learning
strategies.

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In Vietnam, learning strategies have also become a topic of interest in recent years
when the concepts of “self-learning” and “life-long learning” have been familiar to the ears
of both Vietnamese teachers and students. Some studies into this field have been conducted
with different types of learners to find out particular strategies employed by effective and
ineffective learners such as Huyen Tran’s study (2004) on vocabulary learning strategies
used by students of English at Qui Nhon university or Mai Duong’s (2005) on writing
strategies employed by first-year students at Hanoi National University. However, studies
as such are still scarce, thus, more research should be done in order to clarify particular
strategies used in different settings and by learners of different levels.
At the University of Transport and Communications, reading is regarded as the
most important skill to the students because these students need to read a lot of English
technical books and documents to support their professional studies. However, apart from
some students who are quite good at English reading, most students find reading difficult.
They often complain that they have little understanding of the texts they have read and
hardly gain any knowledge from their reading. Having taught the Bridge and Road
Engineering students for several years, I am aware of their problems and very much want
to help them to improve their reading ability. Therefore, I intend to examine their reading
strategies and find out the differences in the strategies used by students of higher reading
abilities and those of lower reading abilities. Based on the findings, I am going to make
some recommendations to improve the students’ reading proficiency.
1.2. Scope, aims and significance of the study
1.2.1. Scope of the study
The study investigates the reading strategies used by effective and ineffective readers
among second-year students of English Bridge and Road class (hereafter EBR) at the
University of Transport and Communications (hereafter UTC). The study of learning
strategies in other English skills would be beyond the scope.

1.2.2. Aims of the study
The major purposes of this study are:
(1) to identify the range of reading strategies utilized by the good readers and poor
readers among the second-year EBR students at the UTC;

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(2) to examine the differences in reading strategy use between these two groups of
readers;
(3) to inform teachers so that they can find ways to improve their students’ reading
proficiency.
In order to achieve the above aims of the study, the following major research questions
will be addressed:
- What is the range of reading strategies used by the good and poor readers among the
EBR students?
- How do the good readers and poor readers differ in terms of reading strategies
employed?
1.2.3. Significance of the study
The study is the first one to be carried out in the field of reading strategy research at
the UTC. It helps give a detailed description of reading strategies used by the good and
poor readers among second-year EBR students at the university. More importantly, it
works out a classification scheme for these reading strategies. It also provides a thorough
analysis of the differences in the reading strategies employed by these two groups of
readers. The findings of their reading strategies can help teachers to understand more about
their students and they can serve as the foundation for some recommendations on how to
improve the students’ reading proficiency. They are also an important basis for reading
strategy based instruction to be implemented in the future.
1.3. Methods of the study
This study is to be conducted as a descriptive study that utilizes both quantitative
and qualitative approaches. The quantitative analysis is employed through the process of
data collected from a written questionnaire and think-aloud reports to examine the

differences between the good and bad readers in their reading strategies. In addition, the
qualitative approach is used to deal with the data collected from interviews with these two
groups of readers. The combination of these data collection methods will help the author
achieve the aims of the study.

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1.4. Organization of the thesis
The study consists of five chapters.
Chapter 1 is the Introduction, which states the rationale, scope, aims, significance, methods
and organization of the study.
Chapter 2 reviews the literature relevant to the topic of research and summarizes some
selected studies on reading strategies, which serves as a theoretical and methodological
foundation of the study.
Chapter 3 presents the research methodology of the study. It provides information about
the participants, the instrumentation, the data collection procedures and data analysis.
Chapter 4 is the main part of the study that reports and discusses the main findings
according to the research questions.
Chapter 5 is the Conclusion that summarizes the findings, presents the implications and
limitations of the study and finally gives some suggestions for further research






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CHAPTER 2
LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter reviews theories related to learning strategies in general and reading

strategies in particular. It also summarizes some studies on reading strategies that have
been conducted so far. All of these serve as a basis for an investigation into reading
strategies which is carried out and presented in the next chapter.
2.1. Learning strategies
2.1.1. Definition
Over the last two decades, the study of learning strategies has seen an “explosion of
activity” (R. Ellis, 1994) with the contributions of such well-known researchers as Tarone
(1981), Weinstein and Mayer (1986), Rubin (1987), O’Malley and Chamot (1990), Oxford
(1990) and Cohen (1998). These studies have helped figure out a comprehensive overview
of learning strategies.
Concerning the definition of learning strategies, there have been some considerable
differences in the existing literature. Rubin (1987) gave quite a broad definition of learning
strategies: “Learning strategies are strategies which contribute to the development of the
language system which the learner constructs and affect learning directly” (1987: 23).
Tarone (1981) defined learning strategies as attempts to develop linguistic and
sociolinguistic competence in the target language. These definitions are too general in
comparison to the complex nature of learning strategies.
Oxford (1990) claimed that “Learning strategies are specific actions taken by the
learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self directed, more effective
and more transferable to new situations” (1990:5). This definition is judged to be quite
comprehensive as it not only covers the cognitive but also the affective aspects of learning
strategies (i.e. to increase enjoyment in learning). However, Oxford’s definition is not
sufficient in the sense that it regards learning strategies as “specific actions”, i.e. learning
strategies are behavioral, and therefore, they are mostly observable. However, a lot of
studies in this field have shown that learning strategies are difficult to observe as they are
not only behavioral.

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In an attempt to define learning strategies in a more sensible manner, Weinstein and
Mayer (in Ellis, 1994:531) claimed that learning strategies “ are the behaviors and thoughts

that a learner engages in during learning that are intended to influence the learner’s
encoding process”. Thus, these two authors see learning strategies both behavioral and
mental. Their view has been shared by most researchers in strategy studies.
The definition that has been widely accepted to date was proposed by O’Malley
and Chamot (1990). According to them, learning strategies are “the special thoughts or
behaviors that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn or retain new information”
(1990: 1). In spite of being quite short, their definition covers the most important aspects of
learning strategies, that is learning strategies are both mental and behavioral (therefore
both observable and unobservable), and learning strategies are individually characterized
(i.e. every learner’s strategies are different). Because of its comprehensive features, the
present study utilized this definition as the key direction in its investigation.
2.1.2. Classification of learning strategies
Much of the earlier research (Rubin 1975 and 1981; Stern 1975; Naiman et al 1978)
focused on compiling inventories of the learning strategies that learners were observed to
use or reported to use.
Rubin (1981) proposed a classification scheme that subsumes learning strategies
under two primary groupings and a number of subgroups. Rubin’s first primary category,
consisting of strategies that directly affect learning, includes clarification/verification,
monitoring, memorization, guessing/inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning and practice.
The second category, consisting of strategies that contribute indirectly to learning, includes
creating practice opportunities and using production tricks such as communication
strategies. An alternative classification scheme proposed by Naiman et al. (1978) contains
five broad categories of learning strategies and a number of secondary categories. The
primary classification includes an active task approach, realization of language as a means
of communication and interaction, management of affective demands and monitoring of
second language performance.
Subsequent descriptive studies have endeavored to identify broad classes of
learning strategies, under which a large number of more specific strategies can be grouped.
The works of Wenden (1983), Oxford (1990), O’Malley et al (1985a and 1985b),

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O’Malley and Chamot 1990) have made an important contribution to our knowledge of
learning strategies. Wenden’s (1983) research examined the strategies that adult foreign
language learners use in order to direct their own learning. She identifies three general
categories of self-directing strategies: (1) knowing about language (relating to what
language and language learning involves, (2) planning (relating to the what and how of
language learning) and (3) self-evaluation (relating to progress in learning and the learner’s
response to the learning experience). Wenden’s framework was devised as a basis for
learner training.
R. Oxford (1990) built on the earlier classifications with the aim of subsuming
within her taxonomy virtually every strategy previously mentioned in the literature. Oxford
(1990) draws a general distinction between direct and indirect strategies. The former
consists of memory, cognitive and compensation strategies while the latter includes
metacognitive, affective and social strategies. However, Oxford’s classification of learning
strategies is somewhat complicated and confusing as she treats compensation strategies as
a direct type of learning strategies and memory strategies as separate ones from cognitive
strategies.
Perhaps, the framework that has been most useful and generally accepted is
O’Malley and Chamot (1990)’s. In O’Malley and Chamot's framework, three major types
of strategies are distinguished in accordance with the information processing model, on
which their research is based. Metacognitive strategies are “higher order executive skills
that may entail planning for, monitoring or evaluating the success of a learning activity”
(O’Malley and Chamot: 44). Cognitive strategies “operate directly on incoming
information, manipulating it in ways that enhance learning” (O’Malley and Chamot, 1990:
44). The last type of learning strategies is Social/Affective which “involves either
interaction with another person or ideational control over affect”. (O’Malley and Chamot,
1990: 45). The subtypes of these strategies presented in Table 2.1 were identified by
O’Malley and Chamot on the basis of their several descriptive studies on learning
strategies used by second language learners.

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Table 2.1. Learning strategy definition and classification (O' Maley and Chamot, 1990: 119)
Learning strategy Definition
A. Metacognitive strategies

Planning

Advance organizers Previewing the main ideas and concepts of the material to be
learned, often by skimming the text for the organizing principle.
Directed attention Deciding in advance to attend in general to a learning task and to
ignore irrelevant distracters.
Functional planning Planning for and rehearsing linguistic components necessary to
carry out an upcoming task.
Selective attention Deciding in advance to attend to specific aspects of input, often
by scanning for key words, concepts and/or linguistic markers.
Self-management Understanding the conditions that help one learn and arranging
for the presence of those conditions.
Monitoring
Self-monitoring Checking one’s comprehension during listening or reading or
checking the accuracy and/or appropriateness of one’s oral or
written production while it is taking place.
Evaluation

Self-evaluation Checking the outcomes of one’s own language against a standard
after it has been completed.
B. Cognitive Strategies

Resourcing Using target language reference materials such as dictionaries,
encyclopedias, or textbooks.

Repetition Imitating a language model, including overt practice and silent
rehearsal.
Grouping Classifying words, terminology or concepts according to their
attributes or meaning.
Deduction Applying rules to understand or produce the second language or
making up rules based on language analysis.
Imagery Using visual images (either mental or actual) to understand or

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remember new information.
Auditory representation Planning back in one’s mind the sound of a word, phrase or
longer language sequence.
Key word method Remembering a new word in the second language by: (1)
identifying a familiar word in the first language that sounds like
or otherwise resembles the new word, and (2) generating easily
recalled images of some relationship with the first language
homonym and the new word in the second language.
Elaboration Relating new information to prior knowledge, relating different
parts of new information to each other, or making meaningful
personal associations with the new information.
Transfer Using previous linguistic knowledge or prior skills to assist
comprehension or production.
Inferencing Using available information to guess meanings of new items,
predict outcomes or fill in missing information.
Note taking Writing down key words or concepts in abbreviated verbal,
graphic or numerical form while listening or reading.
Summarizing Making a mental, oral or written summary of new information
gained through listening or reading.
Recombination Constructing a meaningful sentence or larger language sequence
by combining known elements in a new way.

Translation Using the first language as a base for understanding and/or
producing the second language
C.Social/Affective
strategies

Question for clarification Eliciting from a teacher or peer additional explanations,
rephrasing, examples or verification.
Cooperation Working together with one or more peers to solve a problem, pool
information, check a learning task, model a language activity, or
get feedback on oral or written performance.
Self-talk Reducing anxiety by using mental techniques that make one feel
competent to do the learning task.

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This classification of learning strategies is comprehensive and sufficient and it is
applicable to learning strategy studies on four English disciplines. Therefore, the current
study will adopt O’Malley and Chamot's classification of learning strategies as the
theoretical framework for investigation.
2.2. The theory of reading
2.2.1. Definition
For many students, reading is a very important skill, particularly in English as a
second or foreign language. Concerning the role of reading, Carrell (1988:1) stated that
“Without solid reading proficiency, second language learners cannot perform at levels they
must in order to succeed”. Anderson (1999) also confirms that “the more exposure a
student has to language through reading, the greater the possibilities that overall language
proficiency will increase” (1999:3).
Reading plays such a significant part in the success of second language learning
and it is essential to understand what reading really is. However, the act of reading is not
completely understood nor easily described. In a general term, reading is defined as “an
active, fluent process which involves the reader and the reading material in building

meaning” (Anderson,1999: 1). This definition of reading has been generally shared by
other researchers.
According to Rumelhart (1977), reading involves the reader, the text and the
interaction between the reader and text. Aebersold and Field (1997: 15) share the same
view on reading: “Reading is what happens when people look at a text and assign meaning
to the written symbols in that text. The text and the reader are the two physical entities
necessary for the reading process to start. It is, however, the interaction between the text
and the reader that constitutes actual meaning”. These interactions, in their opinion, are the
interactions between purpose and manner of reading and through reading strategies and
schema. Purpose determines how people read a text. People may read the text to
understand it (reading for full comprehension), or simply to get the general idea
(skimming), to find the part that contains the information they need (scanning). Readers
also use some mental activities that are often referred to as reading strategies to construct
meaning from a text. In addition, readers base on their previous knowledge that they bring
to the text to assist their reading comprehension. This prior knowledge is known as the

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schema. Research in reading has shown that schema plays an important role in helping the
reader to comprehend a text.
The above-mentioned views on reading are only general ones. In order to
understand more about the nature of reading, it is necessary to take a closer look at the
actual process that really takes place in the reader’s mind. So far, several models have been
proposed to describe this process. The next section is going to present these models of
reading and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.
2.2.2. Models of reading process
Up to now, attempts to describe the interaction between reader and text have been
numerous and different views of the reading process have been proposed. These views are
often grouped under three different reading models named the bottom-up, the top-down
and the interactive ones.
2.2.2.1. Bottom-up model

Early researchers often assumed a passive, bottom up view of second language
reading, that is it was viewed as “a decoding process of reconstructing the author’s
intended meaning” via recognizing the printed letters and words and building up a meaning
for a text from the smallest textual units at the bottom (letters and words) to larger and
larger units at the top (phrases, clauses, intersentential linkages) (Rivers 1964, 1968;
Plaister 1968; Yorio 1971).
In other words, in the bottom-up reading model, the reader begins with the written
text (the bottom) and constructs meaning from the letters, words, phrases and sentences
found within and then processes the text in a linear fashion. The incoming data from the
text must be received before the high level mental stages of understanding transform and
recode the data.
Gough (1972) who supported this reading model explained the sequence of the
reading system from a bottom-up perspective as follows: First, the graphemic information
enters through the visual system and is transformed at the first level from a letter character,
that is from a graphemic representation to a phonemic representation. Second, the phonemic
representation is converted, at level two into a word. The meaning units or words then pass
on to the third level and meaning is assimilated into the knowledge system.

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In short, the bottom-up model tends to be linear as they start with the printed
stimuli and proceed to higher level stage, one step after another. The basis for bottom-up
processing is the linguistic knowledge of the reader. However, this model reveals several
shortcomings in describing the actual reading process.
An important drawback of this model, as pointed out by Samuel and Kamil
(1988:31), is “the lack of feedback, in that no mechanism is provided to allow for
processing stages which occur later in the system to influence processing which occurs
earlier in the system. Because of the lack of feedback loops in the early bottom-up models,
it was difficult to account for sentence-context effects and the role of prior knowledge of
text topic as facilitating variables in word recognition and comprehension.”.
Due to this limitation, and together with the advent of Goodman’s top-down view

of reading, the bottom-up view of reading fell into disfavor.
2.2.2.2. Top-down model
About over three decades ago, the views on reading changed together with the top-
down model of reading. Goodman (1971: 135) described reading as a “psycholinguistic
guessing game”, in which the “reader reconstructs, as best as he can, a message which has
been encoded by a writer as a graphic display”. According to this point of view, the reader
reconstructs meaning from written language by using the graphonic, syntactic and semantic
systems of the language, but he/she merely uses cues from the three levels of language to
predict meaning, and most important, confirms those predictions by relating them to
his/her past experiences and knowledge of the language.
Although Goodman did not characterize his theory as a top-down model, several
other reading experts (Anderson 1978; Cziko 1978) have considered it as basically a
concept-driven top-down pattern in which “higher level processes interact with and direct
the flow of information through low level processes” (Stanovich 1980:34). In this top-
down approach, the reader begins with a set of hypotheses or predictions about the
meaning of text he is about to read and then selectively sample the text to determine
whether or not his predictions are correct. Reading is a process of reconstructing meaning
rather than decoding form, and the reader only resorts to decoding if other means fail. This
perspective was shared by many other reading specialists such as Carrel (1988), Clarke and
Siberstern (1977), Mackey and Mountford (1979) and Widdowson (1978, 1983) as they

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viewed reading as “an active process in which the second language reader is an active
information processor who predicts while sampling only parts of the actual text” (in Carrel,
1988:3).
Just like bottom-up models, top-down models do have some limitations. These
models “tend to emphasize such higher-level skills as the prediction of meaning by means
of context clues or certain kinds of background knowledge at the expense of such lower
skills as the rapid and accurate identification of lexical and grammatical form. That is, in
making the perfectly valid point that fluent reading is primarily a cognitive process, they

tend to deemphasize the perceptual and decoding dimensions of that process” (Eskey,
1988: 93).
Samuel and Kamil (1988) also share the same view. According to them, one of the
problems for the top-down model is that for many texts, the reader has little knowledge of
the topic and cannot generate predictions. A more serious problem is that even if a skilled
reader could generate predictions, the amount of time necessary to generate a prediction may
be greater than the amount of time the skilled reader needs simply to recognize the words.
Due to the above limitations of both bottom-up and top-down models, a new and more
insightful model of reading process has been proposed by Rumelhart (1977, 1980), Sanford
and Garrod (1981) and van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) under the name of interactive model.
2.2.2.3. Interactive model
The interactive model combines elements of both bottom-up and top-down
approaches, assuming that “a pattern is synthesized based on information provided
simultaneously from several knowledge sources” (Stanovich, 1980: 35).
Widdownson (1979) has discussed reading as the process of combining textual
information with the information a reader brings to a text. In this view, the reading process
is not simply a matter of extracting information from the text. Rather, it is one in which the
reading activates a range of knowledge in the reader’s mind that he or she uses, and that, in
turn, may be refined and extended by the new information supplied by the text.
Eskey (1988) defined the interactive model as a reading model that “posits a
constant interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing in reading, each source
of information contributing to a comprehensive reconstruction of the meaning of the text”

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(1988: 94). According to this view, good readers are regarded as “both good decoders and
good interpreters of texts, their decoding skills becoming more automatic but no less
important as their reading skill develops” (1988: 94). Eskey also believed that to achieve
both fluency and accuracy in reading, developing readers must work at perfecting both
their bottom-up recognition skills and their top-down interpretation strategies. In other
word, good reading - that is, fluent and accurate reading- can result only from a constant

interaction between these two processes.
The following comment by Stanovich (1980) can summarize all the strengths of the
interactive model over the other two models:
“Interactive models of reading appear to provide a more accurate conceptualization
of reading performance than strictly top-down or bottom-up models. When combined with
an assumption of compensatory processing (that a deficit in any particular process will
result in a greater reliance on their knowledge sources, regardless of their level in the
processing hierarchy), interactive models provide a better account of the existing data on the
use of orthographic structure and sentence context by good and poor readers” (1980: 32)
Therefore, it is generally agreed that the interactive model is the best one that can
truly reflect the reading process that takes place in the reader’s mind. In this process, the
reader constantly shuttles between bottom-up and top-down processes and he can not be
successful in reading comprehension without either of these two processes. As this study
focuses on reading strategies, the next part is going to summarize some outstanding studies
on reading strategies that have been carried out.
2.2.3. Reading strategies
2.2.3.1. Definition
Much attention has been paid to the study of reading in general and reading
strategies in particular. Reading strategies are of interest for what they reveal about the
way the readers manage their interaction with written text and how these strategies are
related to text comprehension.
As mentioned earlier, research in second language learning suggests that learners
use a variety of strategies to assist them with the acquisition, storage and retrieval of
information. C. Brantmeier (2002) defined reading strategies as “the comprehension

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processes that readers use in order to make sense of what they read” (2002:1). This process
may involve skimming, scanning, guessing, recognizing cognates and word families,
reading for meaning, predicting, activating general knowledge, making inferences,
following references and separating main ideas from supporting ones (Barnet, 1988).

Obviously, some strategies may be more useful than others with different types of reading
texts and tasks.
Based on O’Maley and Chamot’s (1990), reading strategies can be understood as
the special thoughts or behaviours that individuals use to help them to comprehend, learn
and retain new information from the reading text. These strategies are both observable and
unobservable and individually different. According to O’Malley and Chamot (1990),
reading strategies can be classified into three main types including the metacognitive,
cognitive and social/affective strategies. A categorization scheme of these strategies have
been provided in section 2.1.2.
2.2.3.2. Review of reading strategy research
A considerable number of studies examine the comprehension strategies that
second language readers utilize to process a text. In these studies, the participants are quite
diverse, some from elementary, secondary and university levels, some from remedial
reading classes and others enrolled in courses taught at non-university language centres.
Obviously, the participants are of many different ages and backgrounds. Furthermore, the
investigators use a variety of research methods and tasks to examine strategy type and
frequency of strategy use including think-aloud reports, interviews, questionnaires,
observations and written recalls (Bernhardt, 1991). Table 2.2 provides a brief summary of
the selected studies.

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Table 2.2. Foreign Language Reading Strategy Research
Author Participants/Methods Coding Scheme Results
Hosenfield
(1977)
Ninth grade students
learning French; 20
successful readers and 20
poor readers; think-aloud
reports for each sentence

they read
Two different codes:
Main - meaning line
and word solving
strategies
(1) Successful readers kept
meaning of passage in mind
while assigning meaning to
sentence etc; whereas poor
readers focused on solving
unknown words or phrases
Block
(1986)
9 university level ESL and
native English students in
a remedial reading course;
think-aloud reports for
each sentence they read
Two different codes:
General strategies and
local strategies

(1) More successful readers:
(a) used their general
knowledge
(b) focused on the overall
meaning of text
(c) integrated new
information with old
(d) differentiated main ideas

from supporting points.
(2) The poor readers rarely
did any of the above
Sarig
(1987)
Ten female native Hebrew
readers studying English
as a foreign language;
Think-aloud reports while
reading native language
texts and foreign language
texts
Four different codes
(1) technical aids,
such as skimming,
scanning, using
glossary
(2) clarification and
simplification such
as decoding
meanings of
(1) Subjects transferred
strategies from L1 to L2
reading
(2) Global strategies led to
both successful and
unsuccessful reading
comprehension
(3) Classification and
simplication strategies

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words,
paraphrasing,
syntactic
simplification
(3) coherence
detection such as
identification of
text type and use
of prior content
schemata
(4) monitoring moves
such as mistake
correction,
slowing down and
identification of
misunderstanding
contributed to
unsuccessful reading
comprehension in L1
and L2

Carrell
(1989)
75 native English speakers
learning Spanish in first,
second and third-year
courses; 45 native
speakers of Spanish in

intermediate ESL courses;
written strategy use
questionnaires, multiple
choice comprehension
questions
Two different codes:
Global or top-down
strategies;
Local or bottom-up
strategies
(1) Spanish as a foreign
language group at lower
proficiency levels used more
bottom-up processing
strategies, (2) ESL group at
advanced levels used top-
down strategies
Anderson
(1991)
26 Spanish speaking adult
English as Second
Language students:
DTLS (Descriptive Test of
(1) understanding
main ideas
(2) understanding
direct statements
(1) Students who used more
strategies comprehended
better

(2) No significant

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Language Skills reading
Comprehension Test) with
multiple choice questions;
TPR (Textbooks Reading
Profile) with think-aloud
reports)
(3) drawing inferences

Coding Scheme for
TRP
(1) supervising
(2) supporting
(3) paraphrasing
(4) establishing
coherence
(5) test taking
relationship between the
amount of unique
strategies and
comprehension

Block
(1992)
16 proficient readers of
English, 9 non-proficient
readers of English; think-
aloud reports at sentence

level
Two different codes:
Meaning based (global)
and word level (local)
(1) Less proficient readers
used local strategies.
(2) More proficient readers
relied on global
strategies
One of the earliest pieces of research on individual learners’ reading strategies was
conducted by Hosenfeld (1977). She examined successful readers and unsuccessful readers
to find out what types of cognitive operations they used to process written texts.
Participants were ninth grade students who were learning French. Before conducting her
study, she classified readers based on a test of L2 reading. Then, in an oral interview,
participants were asked to read a text and do think-aloud reports (that is, she directed them
to say in their first language whatever came to their mind while processing each sentence
in the text). Hosenfeld found out that the successful readers used the following kinds of
strategies (1977: 233- 4):
o keep the meaning of the passage in mind
o read in broad phrases
o skip inessential words
o guess from context the meaning of unknown words
o have a good self-concept as a reader

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o identify the grammatical category of words
o demonstrate sensitivity to a different word order
o examine illustrations
o read the title and make inferences from it
o use orthographic information (e.g. capitalization)

o refer to the side glossary
o use the glossary as a last resort
o look up words correctly
o continue if unsuccessful at decoding a word or phrase
o recognize cognates
o use their knowledge of the world,
o follow through with a proposed solution to a problem
o evaluate their guesses.
Poor readers, on the other hand, translated sentences and lost the general meaning
of the passage, rarely skipped words or looked up unknown words in a glossary and had a
poor concept as a reader. While these results clearly described the strategies students used
to process the text, they did not link the strategy use to comprehension of specific
paragraphs or to the text as whole. The data only focused on sentence level comprehension
so the results of the study did not reveal overall comprehension of the entire text.
A decade later, Block’s (1986) study compared the reading comprehension
strategies used by native English speakers and ESL students who were enrolled in a
remedial reading course at the university level and she connected these behaviors to
comprehension. The participants were identified as non-proficient readers because they
failed a college reading proficiency test before the study. Subjects read two exploratory
passages selected from an introductory psychology textbook, and were asked to think
aloud while reading (they reported after each sentence). After reading and retelling each
passage, the participants answered twenty multiple choice comprehension questions. Block
developed a scheme to classify strategies that consisted of two types: general strategies and

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local strategies. General strategies included the following behaviors: anticipate content,
recognize text structure, integrate information, question information, distinguish main
ideas, interpret the text, use general knowledge and associations to background, comment
on behavior or process, monitor comprehension, correct behavior, focused on textual
meaning as a whole, and react to the text. Local strategies were: paraphrase, reread,

question meaning of a clause or a sentence, question meaning of a word and solve a
vocabulary problem. Of the 9 ESL students in the study, the readers with higher
comprehension scores on the retelling and the multiple choice questions integrated new
information in the text with old information, distinguished main ideas from details, referred
to their background and focus on the textual meaning as a whole. This means they all
eomployed “general strategies”. On the other hand, readers with low comprehension scores
rarely distinguished main ideas from details, rarely referred to their background,
infrequently focused on textual meaning and seldom integrated information.
Sarig (1987) investigated the contribution of L1 reading strategies and L2 language
proficiency to L2 reading, as well as the relationship between L1 and L2 reading strategies.
Sarig’s subjects were 10 female native Hebrew readers who were studying English as a
foreign language. Sarig classified the data from think-aloud reports into four general types
of behaviors or responses: (1) technical aids, (2) clarification and simplification, (3)
coherence detection and (4) monitoring moves. Sarig’s results revealed that subjects
transferred strategies from L1 reading to L2 reading and that the same reading strategy
types “accounted for success and failure in both languages to almost the same extent”
(Sarig, 1987: 118). Top-down, global strategies led to both successful and unsuccessful
reading comprehension. The two language dependent strategies, the clarification and
simplification strategies contributed to unsuccessful reading comprehension in both L1 and
L2. Results also indicated that most of the strategies used during the reading
comprehension process were particular to each reader or that each individual reads
differently and used a different combination of strategies. These results do not duplicate
Block’s (1986) where global strategies led to successful (not unsuccessful) reading
comprehension.
Some studies have shown that better readers are also better strategy users. Carrel
(1989) for example, conducted a study to investigate the metacognitive awareness of
second language reader strategies in both their first and second language and the

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relationship between this awareness and their comprehension. Her first group of subjects

was native Spanish speakers of intermediate and high-intermediate levels studying English
as a second language at a university level institute. Her second group consisted of native
English speakers learning Spanish as a foreign language in first, second and third-year
courses. Carrel first asked subjects to read two texts, one in L1 and one in L2. She
controlled for content schemata as both texts were on a general topic of language. The
subjects then answered multiple-choice comprehension questions about the text followed
by a strategy use questionnaire. Carrel correlated strategy use with comprehension and
concluded that the ESL readers of more advanced proficiency level perceived “global” or
top-down strategies as more effective. With the Spanish as a L2 group, she found that at
the lower proficiency levels, subjects used more bottom-up or “local” strategies.
Anderson (1991) examined individual differences in strategy use on two types of
reading tasks: standardized reading comprehension tests and academic texts. The subjects
were 28 Spanish-speaking adult students (18 females and 10 males) enrolled in university
level English as a second language courses. On the first day of the study, Anderson
assessed participants’ reading comprehension skills with a typical standardized test. On a
different day, participants read two passages from the Textbook Reading Profile, which
consisted of academic reading passages taken from fresh-men level texts. The subjects
verbalized reading strategies used for both forms of reading comprehension. The results of
Anderson’s qualitative and quantitative inquiries demonstrated that for both the
standardized reading comprehension test and the textbook reading, participants who used
more strategies tended to comprehend better. Of relevance is that results also indicated that
there is not a statistically significant relationship between the number of particular
strategies reported and overall comprehension scores on the reading tasks.
The last study mentioned here was conducted by Block (1992). He investigated the
comprehension monitoring process used by first and second language readers of English.
The subjects were 25 college freshmen and consisted of proficient and non-proficient
readers of English. While reading an expository text, the participants were asked to think
aloud or more specifically, to “say everything they understood and everything they were
thinking as they read each sentence” (Block, 1992: 323). The results indicated that when
facing a vocabulary problem, proficient ESL readers used background knowledge, decided

on whether the word contributed to the overall meaning of the passage, reread the sentence

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and used syntactic clues. These meaning -based strategies are classified as global
behaviors. On the other hand, non-proficient ESL readers focused on identifying lexical
problems and did little to figure out the meaning of words.
From the above findings of research in reading strategies, it becomes clear that
there are indeed differences between successful or good readers and less successful or poor
readers in terms of strategy use. Overall, more proficient readers combine both top-down
and bottom-up strategies in reading but tend to use more top-down strategies than bottom-
up ones. Specifically, they exhibit the following types of reading behavior:
• overview text before reading
• employ context clues such as titles, subheadings and diagrams
• look for important information while reading and pay greater attention to it
than other information
• attempt to relate important points in text to one another in order to
understand the text as a whole
• activate and use prior knowledge to interpret text
• reconsider and revise hypothesis about the meaning of text based on text
content
• attempt to infer information from the text
• attempt to identify or infer the meaning of words not understood or
recognized
• monitor text comprehension
• use strategies to remember text (paraphrasing, repetition, making notes,
summarizing, self-questioning etc)
• understand relationships between parts of text and recognize text structure
• change reading strategies when comprehension is perceived not be
proceeding smoothly
• evaluate the qualities of text

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• reflect on and process additionally after a part has been read and anticipate
or plan for the use of knowledge gained from the reading
(Hosenfield 1977; Block 1986; Carrel 1986)
While this list is not priotized or complete, it helps provide a description of the
characteristics of successful readers and serves as an important foundation for more
research into reading.
However, a gap that can be found in these studies on reading strategies is that few
researchers who have attempted to classify reading strategies into a more comprehensive
scheme except for top-down and bottom-up strategies (or global or local strategies). This is
the gap that the current thesis study tries to bridge by using O’Malley and Chamot’s
scheme to classify the reading strategies used by the good readers and bad readers among
the EBR students. As mentioned earlier, this scheme was developed by O’Malley and
Chamot (1990) based on their several descriptive studies on learning strategies in four
English skills. It can reflect the actual reading process as it contains both top-down and
bottom-up strategies within its categories. The top-down strategies included in this scheme
are elaboration (relating prior knowledge to new information), transfer (using previous
linguistic knowledge or prior skills to assist comprehension), inferencing (using the
available information to guess meaning of new items and predict outcomes) and
summarizing (making mental or oral summary of new information gained through
reading). The bottom-up strategies are grouping (classifying words, terminology or
concepts according to their attributes or meanings), deduction (applying rules to
understand the second language), recombination (constructing a meaningful sentence or
larger language sequence by combining known elements in a new way), key word methods
(remember a new word in the second language) and translation (using the first language as
a base for understanding the second language). In addition, there are metacognitive
strategies that involve executive processes in planning for reading, monitoring
comprehension and evaluating how well one has achieved a reading activity. Therefore,
this classification framework is quite comprehensive and applicable to examining reading

strategies. In this study, the EBR subjects’ reading strategies are classified according to
these categories of this scheme and differences in their strategies are identified.

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2.3. Summary
This chapter has reviewed related theories on learning strategies in general and
reading strategies in particular. Some of the main points can be summarized as follows.
Concerning the definition of learning strategies, there have been quite different
points of views by different scholars. Some scholars see learning strategies as behaviors
while others view them as thoughts and behaviors. However, it is generally agreed that
O’Malley and Chamot’s definition is the most convincing as it covers the significant
features of learning strategies: both mental and behavioral (both observable and
unobservable) and individually characterized.
The classification of learning strategies is also a complex work done by a
considerable number of researchers. Based on descriptive studies on learning strategies of
ESL and EFL learners, Rubin (1975), Naiman et al (1978), Wenden (1983), Oxford
(1990),O’Malley et al. (1985a and 1985b) and O’Malley and Chamot (1990) have
proposed useful schemes for classification of learning strategies. Of these schemes,
O’Malley and Chamot's has been most useful and generally accepted to date. In O’Malley
and Chamot's framework, three major types including metacognitive, cognitive and
social/affective strategies are distinguished in accordance with the information processing
model, on which their research is based. Such a detailed and sufficient classification of
learning strategies is presented in table 2.1 and is going to be adopted for the investigation
of reading strategies for this study.
The second part of this chapter covers the important theories related to reading and
an overview of studies on reading strategies of successful and unsuccessful learners.
Different definitions of reading are provided by different researchers. These authors view
reading based on three reading models namely the bottom-up, top-down and interactive
ones. Bottom-up theorists argues that the reader constructs the text from the smallest units
(letters to words to phrases to sentences, etc) and decoding is an earlier term for this

process. Top-down reading authors insist that readers bring a great deal of knowledge,
expectations, assumptions and questions to the text and, given a basic understanding of the
vocabulary, they continue to read as long as the text confirms their expectations (Goodman
1967). The interactive model, which most researchers currently endorse, argues that both
top-down and bottom-up processes occur in reading, either alternatively or at the same

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time. These theorists describe a process that moves both bottom-up and top-down,
depending on the type of text as well as on the reader’s background knowledge, language
proficiency level, motivation, strategy use and culturally shaped beliefs about reading. In
comparison to the bottom-up and top-down models, interactive models of reading provide
a more accurate conceptualization of reading performance and describe exactly what really
happens during the reader’s reading process. According to this interactive model, good
reading can result only from a constant interaction between the bottom-up and top-down
processes. In other words, good readers are those who can “efficiently integrate” both of
these processes. This view is now shared by a majority of researchers in a numerous
number of studies on reading.
The last part of the chapter discusses reading strategies, the focus of the thesis, in
details. After giving definitions of reading strategies, it reviews some prominent studies on
reading strategies employed by ESL/EFL readers that have been conducted so far. With the
use of a variety of research methods including think-aloud verbal reports, interviews,
questionnaires, observations and written recalls, the investigators tried to examine strategy
type and frequency of strategy use by readers of different proficiency levels. Most of the
researchers have concluded that there are indeed differences between effective and
ineffective readers in terms of strategies used. The more proficient readers often employed
both top-down and bottom-up strategies but appear to use more top-down ones. A detailed
description of reading strategies employed by effective readers is provided so as to serve as
the basis for any research into reading strategies.
The next chapter is the study on reading strategies used by the EBR students, which
has been conducted in the light of the theories discussed above.