Reassessing Reading Strategies in the Engineering Classroom

Abstract

Engineering undergraduates face difficulties in comprehending discipline-specific study materials because the reading skill has been neglected at the school-level, and the students themselves have not been motivated adequately to read. This paper hypothesizes that instruction-sessions on reading strategies enable tertiary-level learners to understand their engineering texts better. In this study, the teacher-researchers distributed a questionnaire to find out the students’ difficulties in academic reading, their attitude to the reading strategies taught, and the usefulness of the instruction-sessions. They also interviewed the students, and systematized the data collected. The analysis showed a mixed reaction from the students. Some of them reported that learning the strategies fostered a positive change in advancing their reading skills, while others testified that strategies had only a negligible role in doing so. Therefore, this study suggests a 5 D approach to strategic reading – Decipher, Digest, Deduce, Detail and Discuss – to overcome the difficulties in reading.