Investigating Students’ Reading Difficulties In Comprehending Esp Texts And The Strategies They Use To Overcome Them: The Case Of First Year Electronics Students' At The Institute Of Electricals And Electronics Engineers Of Boumerdes

Résumé: The present research seeks to investigate the difficulties that ESP students encounter in comprehending texts in their field of study and to know whether they use strategies to overcome difficulties. To achieve this objective, first year students of the Electronic department at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Boumerdes have been taken as a sample. For the sake of empirically investigating the topic, a mixed method approach has been adopted to gather the necessary data. This investigation has used the Quantitative Statistical Procedures to analyze the numerical data gathered from the questionnaire, and Qualitative Content Analysis to interpret the qualitative data of the open-ended questions of both the questionnaire and the interview. The present work relies on the schema theory whichwas developed by Richard Anderson in the1970s. This theory deals with the prior knowledge and it is used in our research to approve that prior knowledge has an importance in reading different ESP text. The findings of the study illustrate that the majority of the participants find difficulties in comprehending ESP texts. This is mainly due to the transitional phase that students have undergone from secondary school to higher education where their specific field of study is based on English as the medium of instruction. In the account of these difficulties in reading comprehension, students’ are aware of using some strategies such as skimming, scanning, prediction and so on, to solve their problems of miscomprehension.

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