Abstract
Concerned by increased problems about the students’ reading quality, this study was carried out to investigate the reading approach of English major students of Ambo University. To achieve this objective, all 52(31 male and 21 female) English major students of the University were purposely selected for the study because the number of the students is small to manage. Both quantitative and qualitative data were obtained from the respondents through Reading Achievement Tests, Questionnaire and Structured Interview and analyzed accordingly. The study mainly focused on the students’ approach to reading (adapted top-down or bottom-up) and the students’ ability to identify the main ideas and details, explicitly stated and implied information, the purpose and the tone of authors in five different reading genres: dialogues, directions, article, essays, and poems. The overall result of the study showed that 89.7% of the University students were exclusively limited to bottom-up approaches to reading and frustrated to determine the main ideas and implied information in the texts. In other words, no student answered more than 78% in reading comprehension items correctly in the tests. Moreover, half of the students could not answer above 50% in the comprehension questions. Therefore, the prescriptions for the solution to the problem lies in bringing about improvement in the students’ interactive approach to reading and thereby, improve students’ ability to identify the main ideas and details, explicitly stated and implied information, the purpose and the tone of authors in different reading genres: dialogues, articles, essays, directions and poem.
Highlights
IntroductionKondo-Brown (2005) defines reading as a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas
No student answered more than 78% in reading comprehension items correctly in the tests
The results shows that the difference between the overall mean score of the first test (32.2) and that of the second (32.4) is 0.2, which signifies that the two tests are consistent and reliable to describe the students’ reading ability
Summary
Kondo-Brown (2005) defines reading as a means of language acquisition, of communication, and of sharing information and ideas. These definitions underline that reading is a complex interaction between the text and the reader which is shaped by the reader’s prior knowledge, experiences, attitude, and language community, which is culturally and socially situated (Grabe, 2009; Pressley, 2006). Scholars attempt to underline the difference among reading ability, reading skills, reading strategies and reading approach. Strategies are a set of relatively automatic abilities including previewing, reviewing, predicting, skimming and scanning, guessing from context, inferring, and paraphrasing (Cubukcu, 2008; Dinner 2009; Kondo-Brown, 2006). Approach to reading or reading model the general framework of reading ability, skill and strategy. Approach to reading is three types: bottom-up (lower-level), top-down (higher level) and integrative (eclectic) reading (NashDizel, 2009)
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