Abstract
This paper explores how the transition from secondary to tertiary education influences Greek marine engineering students’ EFL reading behaviors and strategies from an activity-theory perspective. Data were gathered through individual semi-structured interviews with four first-year students who struggled with reading texts in English. Findings suggest that these students experience difficulties in reading lengthy discipline-specific texts such as technical manuals due to the fact they still use the same EFL reading strategies and have the same expectations they had before entering tertiary education. From an activity theory perspective, these students’ difficulties are associated with two distinct EFL reading activity systems which have diverse goals, tools, values, and division of labour. The first system is placed within the wider Greek foreign language education context these students belonged in high school. The second, involves the system that emerged after they entered the Merchant Marine Academy as tertiary education students. These two EFL reading systems clash and create obstacles in their discipline-specific reading which in turn slows down their disciplinary socialization in the marine engineering community.
Highlights
The transition between secondary and tertiary education generates challenges for undergraduate students which may relate to “a cultural shift between different assumptions and values held about reading and writing” (Harklau, 2001, p. 34) rather than the actual cognitive difficulty of academic literacy
Findings suggest that these students experience difficulties in reading lengthy discipline-specific texts such as technical manuals due to the fact they still use the same English as a Foreign Language (EFL) reading strategies and have the same expectations they had before entering tertiary education
In an attempt to bridge this gap, this paper presents the qualitative facet of a larger study that aimed to explore the English reading difficulties of 1st year marine engineering students at the Merchant Marine Academy of Crete, Greece from an activity theory perspective
Summary
The transition between secondary and tertiary education generates challenges for undergraduate students which may relate to “a cultural shift between different assumptions and values held about reading and writing” (Harklau, 2001, p. 34) rather than the actual cognitive difficulty of academic literacy. In the case of academic reading, this shift may generate additional discomforting experiences for novice readers in tertiary education settings where the medium of instruction is other than English but students are required to read extensive English bibliographies (Spector-Cohen et al, 2001). Due to these new academic requirements these students are suddenly forced to experience an additional transition, that is, an English academic reading transition from “learning to read” English to “reading to learn” from a range of academic genres (Grabe & Stoller, 2013). How does the transition from secondary to tertiary education affect Greek marine engineering students’ EFL reading approach?
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