Abstract
In Pakistan, English is taught as a compulsory subject from grade one to graduate level. It
has been given the status of official language and is considered a symbol of status. In all official correspondence English language is used and it opens up the avenues to have access to high-ranking civil service jobs.
Research studies have revealed that students feel difficulty in reading, speaking and writing English at Secondary school level in Pakistan and they were found to be poor readers and receive lower grades in English
language. Keeping in view the importance of learning English for students, this study was designed with
the purposes to explore the strategies the students adopt for learning Reading English and to determine the
effect of these adopted strategies on students’ reading comprehension performance at secondary school level.
Learning strategies are the basic techniques used for learning English in Pakistan. A survey was conducted
to identify learning strategies used by the learners and their impact on reading comprehension performance of
the learners. A sample comprising of 359 students was selected using stratified random sampling technique
from amongst the Higher Secondary Schools and intermediate colleges located in district Naushahro Feroze
Sindh Pakistan. Data for the study were collected through Questionnaire, interview protocol and reading
comprehension test. The results indicated that students use variety of reading learning strategies including
reading aloud, silent reading, summarizing the reading texts, outlining grammatical structures and patterns
contained in the reading texts, answering simple questions, looking for the meaning of new vocabulary and
translating English texts in their mother language. However, the use of these strategies by the students is not
on a regular, systematic and need based. The analysis of the data revealed that learning strategies adopted
by students for reading English were strongly correlated with their performance in reading comprehension.
It was further found that students of urban area (mean score= 45.80) performed significantly better than
their peers in rural areas (mean score= 39.16). However, while applying t-test of significance no significant
difference in the performance of male and female learners (mean score: 42.07 & 42.89) was detected. Additionally, students’ performance in answering questions, summarizing, reading aloud, learning grammatical
patterns, translating, looking for the meaning of vocabulary and learning spellings was satisfactory but their
performance in analyzing, paraphrasing, prcising during reading was poor. The conclusion drawn is that
students use different strategies for reading and that these adopted strategies have an effect on their reading
comprehension. In terms of gender, there was no significant difference on use of strategies and impact on their
reading performance, while students in urban area perform better than their peer in rural areas.
Roshan Ali Teevno, Rasul Bakhsh Raisani. (2017) English Reading Strategies and their Impact on Students’ Performance in Reading Comprehension, Journal of Education & Social Sciences, Volume 5, Issue 2.
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