The Text Is Too Long: Assisting University Students with Reading Academic Texts in a Foreign Language

Abstract

University studies rely primarily on written sources, which have to be read, comprehended and then discussed by students and teachers in class to become a part of an expanding knowledge system. For several years, the author has been teaching an introductory course on second language acquisition to first year BA English Philology students in Poland. She has noticed that throughout the years, the students have had more and more problems with comprehending the basic course-related texts and passing course tests. To help them, the author decided to change the way of working with the texts by implementing a support reading strategy based on generating questions to the texts by the students themselves. This intervention resulted in better text comprehension, which contributed to a development of knowledge, as evidenced by test results and reported by students in a post-course survey. Making text-based questions, the students worked in groups which supported their self-confidence and the feeling of success.