Developing English Reading Comprehension Ability of EFL Undergraduate Students through Text Structure

Abstract

  Despite the fact that reading can be thought of as an essential life skill, motivating students to read inside or outside of the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom can be difficult.The purposes of this research were 1) to investigate the extent to which Text Structure can help first-year students at Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology to read more effectively and 2) to explore the students’ attitudes towards learning reading through the use of Text Structure. The research participants were 20 first-year students at Thai-Nichi Institute of Technology. Text structure was used with the subject group over an eight-week period. The instruments for data collection were lesson plans, an English reading comprehension test, and the questionnaire of attitudes towards learning through Text Structure. The study employed mean difference and standard deviation.  The researcher administered the English reading comprehension test before and after teaching, the pre-test and post-test scores of the group were compared using the
t-test dependent measure. The findings of the study were as follows: 1) Text structure technique enabled the students to gain better English comprehension. The students’ post-test scores after they were exposed
to the technique were statistically higher than their pre-test ones at a 0.01 level. 2) As to their attitudes towards Text Structure, the findings indicated that most students expressed positive attitudes towards learning English reading through the use of Text Structure.