Effectiveness of the Reading Strategies Used by Engineering Students at the Undergraduate Level

Abstract

Communication skills consist of four primary skills namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. This study tries to investigate the effectiveness of the reading strategies used by undergraduate technical students with diverse backgrounds at the intermediate level of learning English. A total of 371 Tamil-speaking Indian students of second-year and third-year of an engineering institute in South India participated in this study. They were provided with a list of questions that were five-point Likert scale closed-ended. The survey was conducted in the presence of the researchers for effective collection of data. To measure the reliability of the data collected, the Cronbach alpha test was conducted and the coefficients were derived. IBM SPSS and the data analysis tools of MS Excel were used for data analysis. The items presented in the questionnaire were divided into three sub-scales and the effectiveness of the same was interpreted. The results showed that the global understanding strategy is predominantly used by the participants followed by problem-solving strategy and supporting strategy. This lays the scope for the enhancement of the items clubbed under the problem-solving strategy and supporting strategy. The study also suggests training the instructors and the students to evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies and compare them with their peers’ strategies for better investigation and learning experience.