Junior High School Low Achievers’English Reading Comprehension Difficulties in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Yu-Ming Wu, 吳有明
• Other Authors: Shiau-Ping Tian
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/51098984984527888586

碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 應用外語系 === 96 === ABSTRACT The main purposes of this study are to identify reading comprehension difficulties encountered by junior high school low achievers in Taiwan, to investigate their reading strategies and their current reading situations, and to find the support they need. This investigation is focused on reading comprehension difficulties they encounter and reading strategies they use at the three stages—pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading. The participants of this study were 330 grade eight students and five English teachers from one junior high school in Taipei County. The five teachers and five of the 330 students were interviewed. The students were required to fill in the questionnaires designed by the researcher. Totally, 330 valid questionnaires were collected and used for data analysis. The interviews were audio-taped, transcribed and analyzed. The major findings of this study are summarized as follows: (1) The major difficulties encountered by the participants when reading English were: (a) they lacked the patience to deal with long texts, and were unable to comprehend the main point from a long sentence or text; (b) they felt that the complicated grammar hindered their understanding of the text; (c) they recognized that there were many unknown words for them in the text and thus their comprehension was limited; (d) they had no interest in the topics of the text; (e) they could not concentrate on reading; and (f) they seldom employed effective reading strategies to overcome their reading difficulties. (2) The current English learning situation of the participants were: (a) most of them never read English at home, and then the others spent less than 30 minutes reading English at home; (b) they did not developed good reading habits; (c) they started to experience English reading difficulties from grade seven; grade four or even earlier; and (d) they seldom got help from their family to solve their reading problems. (3) The majority of low achievers still looked forward to the reading strategy instruction from their teachers. Based on the main findings above, some suggestions are provided.