MA (English) / Department of English / The purpose of this study was to investigate the English reading strategies utilised by level-one students at the University of Venda. The respondents in this study were three hundred and nine level-one students from various Schools in the University of Venda who were doing English Communication Skills (ECS) course in the 2016 academic year. The study adopted a mixed methods research design (quantitative and qualitative research approaches). Data were collected by means of a self-completion questionnaire of the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) developed by Mokhtari and Sheorey. The researcher employed descriptive statistics to analyse frequency use of each reading strategy using frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation, and usage level. Open-ended data were summarised by using grouping technique. The results of the study revealed that the participants in this study were, to a large extent, aware of what they were doing when reading as they reported utilising English reading strategies with different frequencies and with the high and moderate levels of reading strategy usage. The highest mean frequency with which the respondents used a given category of strategies when reading English academic materials was 3.98 (high) which was derived from the category of problem-solving strategies, while the category of support reading strategies and global reading strategies were reported being used with the relative mean of 3.79 (high) and 3.57 (high) respectively. The findings can be helpful to students in increasing their awareness of reading strategies while reading, improving their understanding of the reading process, and enhancing confidence in their own reading ability and to teachers and lecturers in helping their students learn to become constructively responsive and thoughtful readers, which will promote academic reading skills and ultimately enhance academic achievement.

No description available.

The purpose of the study was to understand teachers’ knowledge and experiences associated with teachers’ sense-making of their literacy coaching experiences. The researcher used qualitative research methods in the form of interview data and classroom observations to examine teachers’ sense-making experiences informed through sociocultural theories. The researcher collected data from 5 teacher participants, mostly African Americans, who taught students who were also predominantly African American. Teachers’ years of teaching experience ranged from 9 years to 40 years. The study found that literacy coaching may improve teachers’ abilities to scaffold students’ cognitive reasoning. The study suggested that more, in-depth learning of subject-matter content, an understanding of students’ instructional tasks, and an increase of duration in literacy coaching may be required before teachers can implement literacy instruction above literal comprehension. In contrast, the findingssuggested that additional efforts in literacy coaching may be required to improve teachers’ scaffolding of students’ background knowledge.The findings revealed that few teachers may understand the influences of students’ cultural backgrounds upon students’ learning. The present study implied that additional and closer examination of how teachers scaffold cultural background knowledge during reading instruction may provide insight related to the role of knowledge about teachers’ metacognition while engaged in literacy coaching. Moreover, the results of the present study suggested that literacy coaching may promote teacher and student learning over extended periods of time. The study found that 4thgrade students showed small achievement gains among individual students moving from 3rd grade to 4thgrade during the year of the intervention. Finding of small gains occurring during the year that the intervention was provided may suggest an expectant growth projection over time. Nonetheless, the present study did not find that literacy coaching conclusively impacted gains in literacy achievement.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.