Text 1 Text 2 Text 3 Average
5.3 General recommendations
In addition to the foregoing criteria, the results of the study support the following recommendations.
1. Exposure to appropriate methods and materials
To develop the ability to understand written English, it is essential that FL learners have a sufficient amount of exposure to authentic materials. More emphasis should be given to activities that would develop student’s creativity particularly in the skills of constructing meaning, predicting topic development and getting the gist of the passage. Adequate information related to reading context through contextual visuals and discussions should be provided especially before and during reading.
2. Integrating reading and writing
Reading and writing are the skills that are inseparable and interdependent in the way that we frequently use them in our native language. According to Kary
(1988), integration can be understood as taking place ‘between the addressor or the writer writing a text and the addressee or the reader reading one’. The reader is no longer seen as a passive receiver of knowledge but rather as an active builder of meaning. It is hoped that by fully integrating reading and writing instruction with realistic tasks, students will come to understand the ways in which both readers and writers compose text (Silberstein, 1994).
3. Extending reading courses
As reading is one of the most important skills in language learning, it is recommended that it be taught throughout the first and second year of tertiary education. Reading is an essential skill and needs to be trained intensively and gradually to develop as many RC skills as possible, and to cover as many real world situations as possible.
Besides all the recommendation above, to improve students’ reading comprehension, it has to start during the early stages of reading acquisition. The material used to build children reading skills should be geared to their decoding skills, with attention to meaning. While decodable texts can be meaningful and engaging, they will not build children's comprehension skills nor teach them new vocabulary to the extent that might be needed. Comprehension strategies and new vocabulary should be taught using stories more sophisticated than the early decodable text. The teacher should read this text to the children and discuss the meaning with them. After the children become fluent decoders, the children can
apply these comprehension strategies to their own reading. From this, the children will grow to become better readers in the future.
As reading comprehension is among the most important measures of reading skill as it addresses directly the desired end product of the reading task: the extraction and processing of meaning from the text is an important factor to be considered. However, students with reading comprehension difficulties present a diverse and conflicting profile with regard to motivation. Depression and anxiety had negative associations with most motivational and cognitive variables, and the effects were slightly more pronounced for the typical student group.
The findings from this survey lead us to conclude that students need to improve their reading habits. Prior to their entry to university, they have not read much (except while studying in schools). This is the feedback from the questionnaire (refer to Table 13) where 17 students claimed that they do not read a lot, which is between 5 to 10 books in a year. It may be beneficial to have a record of their reading habits in order to make predictions about their academic success.
It would be helpful to course lecturers and administrators to have a heightened awareness of the reading comprehension difficulties faced by students. One of the steps that can be taken to minimize reading comprehension problems would be to incorporate study skills components within the courses or to make reading lists more manageable. This activity can assist in the promotion of autonomous learning and make students more independent and resourceful. The researcher hopes all "reluctant readers" will continue to read after graduation when
the pressure to read is absent, thereby helping to foster a reading culture in the society.
5.4 Suggestion for future research
There are a few recommendations for future research. This study concentrates on RC skills. However, one cannot say that all reading skills are investigated. Collection of data was restricted to students from Libya, Yemen and Saudi Arabia who are studying at the University of Malaya because of the present researcher’s experience with the environment and the students. The sample of the study can be widened by focusing on more nationalities from various universities to get an insight into their problems, skills, views and needs towards reading comprehension.
In addition, the questionnaire also can be administered to the teachers to get feedback from not only the students but from both sides involved in the teaching and learning process of reading. Besides that, the questionnaire can also be distributed to administrators and persons in charge in the Ministry of Education to get a better understanding about their perception and interest in helping the teachers and students to solve the reading comprehension problems and to achieve the purpose and target of reading.
5.5 Conclusion
In conclusion, although much has already been learned about the L1, SL and FL
reading process, so much more lies undiscovered. With regard to the Middle Eastern students, it can be concluded that despite their general perception that they only have a slight or moderate level of difficulty in reading, their performance in the test reveals that they still need a lot more help to upgrade their skills.
Finally, although they claim to be practicing a few of the important strategies, more exposure to higher level processing strategies can help them cope better with the reading texts that are compulsory reading for them at the tertiary level of education.
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