Improving Reading Comprehension of Acehnese EFL Students

Abstract

Literacy learning at undergraduate level can be challenging for all students, but for students who must demonstrate proficiency in reading academic texts in English as a foreign language, the order of difficulty increases greatly. In addition to social and academic pressures to achieve adequate scores on TOEFL or IELTS examinations, students must respond under pressure to linguistically demanding texts on unfamiliar topics and manage all this in a foreign language. Effective reading requires access to productive understandings about language and ways of tackling comprehension. Despite external pressures to improve levels of reading proficiency, many Indonesian students find the motivation to engage with academic texts difficult to master and are under-prepared for the challenges of these examinations. Studies of strategy instruction in reading pedagogy have explored the contribution of several metacognitive strategies to improved reading. But despite the promise of these studies, many students in Indonesia lose motivation to continue with academic study and their teachers are unsure of how to incorporate these successfully in classroom teaching. Overall, little has been done to improve undergraduate students' academic comprehension at TOEFL and IELTS level using strategies like visualisation and summarisation. In addition, the potential of genre-based approaches to comprehension has yet to be related to insights from metacognition research. The question addressed in this study is whether explicit teaching of two metacognitive strategies - visualisation and summarisation - improves students' reading comprehension and leads to higher scores on high-stake tests.