Reading is considered to be a vital skill for academic success, yet it is seldom taught to or practised with students. Students begin to `read to learn' during primary and secondary schooling. However, at tertiary level the academic demands are much greater than before and involve more extensive reading of conceptually more complex texts. This study investigates the implementation of an intensive reading programme for post-matric English Second Language Science students, based on the assumption that reading improves reading. In addition, this study investigates the effect that reading ability has on academic performance in Science, which relies inter alia, on the ability to read, comprehend and interpret word problems. An intervention group and a control group were used to ascertain the effects of an intensive reading programme and the findings suggest that any reading (intensive or extensive) improves reading and language skills. This in turn impacts on academic performance in Science, if students have an ability in Science to begin with. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / MA - SP APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Many L2 students in Namibia are not adequately prepared for the academic demands of university courses, mainly because of poor reading skills in the L2. University students reading below their maturational levels, can mainly be attributed to their print-impoverished backgrounds, as reading is a skill that develops mainly through reading. Without any assistance, poor readers at university will continue to read poorly and as a result perform weaker in their academic courses compared to their peers who are better readers. The overall aim of this study is to explore the effects of a reading intervention program on a group of university students in Namibia. A quasiexperimental method with a control and an intervention group was employed. The effect of reading ability on academic performance was also investigated. In addition, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the pre-literacy experiences of students, the differences between good and poor readers at university, their views about the reading intervention program as well as the attitudes and practices of university lecturers towards reading instruction at tertiary level were examined. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (with specialisation in Applied Linguistics)

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Donnerstag, 13 Uhr. Ein Anruf erreicht eine Bibliothekarin während ihres Auskunftsdienstes: „Ich würde gerne mit meiner 6. Klasse in der nächsten Woche zu Ihnen kommen. Wir haben den Themenkomplex „Sächsische Sagen“ gerade abgeschlossen und nun – vor den Ferien – möchten wir noch etwas Schönes zum Abschluss unternehmen. Ich habe an eine Sagenlesestunde in der Bibliothek gedacht.“ Bibliothekarin: „“Waren die Schüler schon einmal bei uns?“ Lehrerin: „“Das weiß ich leider nicht, ich habe die Klasse gerade erst übernommen.“ Wenn die Bibliothekarin Glück hat, findet sie in ihren Unterlagen ein Konzept zum Thema. Ansonsten erarbeitet sie die Veranstaltung für die Klasse bis zur nächsten Woche neu. Vorsichtshalber geht sie davon aus, dass die Schüler noch nie in der Bibliothek waren. [...]

This study investigates the reading habits of three Thai students between their early twenties to early thirties. Although the focus of interest is on their English reading, their reading habits in Thai and English, both fiction and non-fiction, are studied. None of the three subjects regularly reads fiction in Thai or English, and non-fiction books are read almost exclusively for the purpose of study. The research confirms the hypothesis that present reading habits are determined by positive or negative reading experiences in the past. Subjects who enjoyed positive experiences reading fiction or non-fiction in their early years have become regular readers of fiction or non-fiction; the subject who had negative early reading experiences is not a regular reader of any kind of books in either Thai or English. The study does suggest, however, that despite the strong effect of early reading experiences, positive reading experiences in the present can help adults become engaged readers. / English Studies / M.A. (TESOL)

The purpose of this dissertation was to implement a needs analysis and on the basis of the findings come up with a framework consisting of practical stages and processes, for determining the academic reading needs of teacher trainees of English, at Instituto Superior de Ciências da Educação da Huíla (hereafter, ISCED-Huíla), a higher teacher training institution in Lubango, in southern Angola. The investigation was initially prompted by the lecturers’ perceptions that the academic reading level of undergraduate teacher trainees in Angola was inadequate for the demands of tertiary level study. A scientific approach to investigating the needs of these students was thus adopted. A needs analysis was undertaken in order to determine, in a systematic manner, the academic literacy levels of the students, their attitudes towards reading, the reading strategies they claimed to use when reading academic texts, their academic reading lacks and needs, and the teacher trainers’ perceptions and opinions on the students’ reading competence in specific reading sub-skills, and on university needs analysis procedures. In all, 45 first-year teacher trainees and 5 teacher trainers were involved in the main study. The teacher trainees were required to answer the Accuplacer test, an academic literacy standardized assessment. Both teacher trainees and teacher trainers completed a corresponding questionnaire survey. The findings showed that, among others, first, teacher trainees’ academic literacy levels were below expected from a tertiary level reader; second, there were certain discrepancies between what teacher trainees and teacher trainers considered to be the needs, skills and lacks of the teacher trainees; and third, academic literacy and academic reading skills should be developed in both L1/Portuguese and L2/English. Therefore, a framework for determining the academic reading needs of teacher trainees, for syllabus and programe development and evaluation is presented. It is hoped that the results of the study will be of assistance to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) reading professionals and to teacher educators, especially those in developing countries, involved in selecting, adapting and designing teacher training programmes, materials and tasks in order to improve academic literacy levels in their countries, schools and universities where English is taught as a foreign language. / English Studies / M.A. (Applied Linguistics)

The continued underperformance of many L2 students at primary, secondary and tertiary level is a cause for grave concern in South Africa. In an attempt to better understand the cognitivelinguistic conditions and processes that underlie academic performance and underperformance, this study looks at the problem of differential academic performance by focussing on the inferential ability of undergraduate L2 students during the reading of expository texts. The study works within a constructivist theory of reading, where the successful understanding of a text is seen to involve the construction of a mental representation of what the text is about. Inferencing plays an important role in constructing meaning during reading because it enables the reader to link incoming information with already given information, and it enables the reader to construct a mental representation of the meaning of a text by converting the linear input into a hierarchical mental representation of interrelated information. The main finding showed that the ability to make inferences during the reading of expository texts was strongly related to academic performance: the more inferences students made during the reading of expository texts, the better they performed academically. This relationship held across the making of various inferences, such as anaphoric inferences, vocabulary inferences, inferences about various semantic relations, and thematic inferences. In particular, the ability to make anaphoric, contrastive and causal inferences emerged as the strongest predictors of academic performance. The study provides strong empirical evidence that the ability to make inferences during reading enables a reader to construct meaning and thereby also to acquire new knowledge. Reading is not only a tool for independently accessing information in an information-driven society, it is fundamentally a tool for constructing meaning. Reading and inferencing are not additional tools that students need to master in the learning context- they constitute the very process whereby learning occurs. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

Students who study through the medium of a second language often have reading/listening comprehension and general study problems. This study focuses on particular aspects of these problems only, namely, identification of main ideas, summarisation and note-taking. The aim of this study was w determine the effect of teaching L2 students a combination of metacognitive and cognitive strategies for reading and listening comprehension (the main idea, summarising and note-taking by means of dictation). An intervention programme was designed in order to teach students these skills. There were ten students in both the experimental and the control groups. Both groups were assessed before and after the intervention programme. The findings reveal that the intervention was successful, with the experimental group showing greater improvement than the control group. The findings of this study have implications for second language tertiary learning and teaching theory and practice / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Linguistics)

The present study was conducted in order to determine if a relationship exists between those comprehension processes measured by the Paragraph Comprehension subtest of the McGraw-Hill Basic Skills System Reading Test and the cloze test developed for this project. Two classes of undergraduate education majors enrolled in “Foundations of Performance-Based Education” were administered both the cloze test and the multiple choice comprehension test. A correlation coefficient was computed between the summary scores on the McGraw-Hill and the summary scores on the cloze test. The results yielded a correlation of .021. These results did not support the research hypothesis.

This study investigates the reading habits of three Thai students between their early twenties to early thirties. Although the focus of interest is on their English reading, their reading habits in Thai and English, both fiction and non-fiction, are studied. None of the three subjects regularly reads fiction in Thai or English, and non-fiction books are read almost exclusively for the purpose of study. The research confirms the hypothesis that present reading habits are determined by positive or negative reading experiences in the past. Subjects who enjoyed positive experiences reading fiction or non-fiction in their early years have become regular readers of fiction or non-fiction; the subject who had negative early reading experiences is not a regular reader of any kind of books in either Thai or English. The study does suggest, however, that despite the strong effect of early reading experiences, positive reading experiences in the present can help adults become engaged readers. / English Studies / M.A. (TESOL)