Enhancing Engineering Students’ Reading Comprehension of English for Science and Technology With the Support of an Online Cumulative Sentence Analysis System

• Published in: SAGE open Vol. 4; no. 3
• Main Authors: Tsai, Yea-Ru, Chang, Yukon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.07.2014; SAGE Publishing
• Subjects: cumulative sentence analysis (CSA); English for specific purposes; reading comprehension; computer-assisted reading instruction
• ISSN: 2158-2440; 2158-2440
• DOI: 10.1177/2158244014550610

For engineering students, reading in English is the core competence to absorb professional knowledge in academic settings and their future career, because many authentic textbooks and information about advanced technology have been published in English. The present study sets out to improve English reading comprehension among tertiary-level engineering students. An online reading strategy instruction based on cumulative sentence analysis (CSA) was constructed to enhance the students’ reading comprehension of English technology texts. The comparison between the pre-test and post-test showed that the participants achieved a higher level of reading comprehension performance following the instruction. The findings clearly demonstrated that online CSA strategy instruction is an efficient and feasible approach to helping engineering students cope with their problems of reading English texts. Pedagogical implications are briefly discussed based on the findings of this study.