An investigation of the cognitive reading strategy needs of the freshman students at Hacettepe University

Abstract

In recent years, reading has been considered to be a critical skill, especially in academic oriented classes for which students have to do extensive reading to pursue their studies successfully. The major interest in reading comprehension has become reading strategies due to the research evidence which reveals that successful readers differ from the less successful ones mainly in their stra.tegic approach towards the text they are reading. Therefore, helping readers employ effective strategies is considered to be an essential component of reading classes. This study aimed at identifying the cognitive reading strategies that the freshman students at Hacettepe University need to develop in order to continue their academic studies successfully. The assumption was that the students lack the necessary cognitive strategies which can direct them towards becoming better readers. In testing this assumption, questionnaires, checklists and Think-Aloud Protocols (TAPS) were used as data collection instruments. The questionnaires and TAPs were administered to freshman students in order to collect data on their strategy use. The checklists were administered to the instructors of the Department of Basic English with the purpose of investigating the relationship between cognitive strategy use of the students and the training they get in employing those strategies. For each item in the questionnaires and checklists, frequencies and percentages were determined. In the analysis of the TAPs, transcriptions of student verbalizations were coded to identify the cognitive strategies that were employed during the TAPs. Similarly, frequencies and percentages were calculated for these strategies. A comparison was made to see whether the self reported data about the strategy use is consistent with the strategy use during the actual reading. A further comparison was made between the results of questionnaires, TAPs and the checklists to understand whether the strategy use o f the students reflect the training they get. Findings of the study suggest that freshman students at Hacettepe University lack certain cognitive reading strategies which are believed to be essential in making sense of the written material. According to the results of the study, the strategies that the freshman students need to develop are reading the first line of each paragraph to get the gist, guessing the meaning o f a word by considering its grammatical category, avoiding word-for-word translation, visualization, note-taking, assimilating background knowledge with the text, classifying word according to their meanings and grammatical categories, summarizing and rereading to remember important information.