How Does Studying Abroad Change Chinese Students’ Choices of Reading Strategies

Abstract

This study explores how a change of learning environment from China to the United Kingdom affects Chinese international master’s students’ use of strategies in academic reading. Think aloud was used at two time points in one academic year among 15 participants. To capture the complexity of the academic reading, reading strategies were categorized into textbase processing, situation-model construction, and comprehension monitoring. Quantitative analysis suggests that there were no significant changes in these students’ overall strategy use over time, nor in their deployment of individual strategies. Furthermore, analysis of their parsing strategies indicates a dominant combination of textbase and comprehension monitoring strategies, and this combination was mainly triggered by their decoding difficulties. The findings of the study suggest that the participants’ textbase-dominated processing largely contributed to the static development of their strategy use during their master’s study.