A Study of the English Reading Strategies of Hungarian University Students with Implications for Reading Instruction in an Academic Context

Abstract

The aim of this study is to provide a picture of the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies of a group of Hungarian university students majoring in English, with a view to offering suggestions for developing reading skills improvement programmes. Participants were 86 students in the first or second year of their studies, who completed the Survey of Reading Strategies of Hungarian College Students, which aims to reveal the type of reading strategies respondents report using when reading academic materials in English. The results of the study reveal that on the whole there is a fairly high awareness of all the strategies included in the survey, with a preference among the respondents for problem solving strategies, followed by global and support strategies. Not unexpectedly, the factors that correlate with strategy use awareness are gender, self-rated reading ability, and time spent on reading: females, students who rated themselves higher on the reading ability scale and those who reported spending 7-9 or more hours a week reading study-related materials showed significantly higher levels of strategy usage concerning one or more subscales of the instrument or overall strategy use. These findings confirm the gender effect and patterns of strategy use identified by studies carried out in a variety of contexts. However, when reading ability was measured by a different instrument, an objective reading test, about 30% of the respondents with a high metacognitive awareness and with correlating high self-rated reading ability proved to be poor readers. The paper also examines what the latter finding suggests for reading instruction.