| >
return to program
Title
Rethinking EFL Teacher’s Roles from Learners’ Academic Reading Difficulties and Needs
Presenter
Ming-Yueh Shen
Abstract
More and more technical universities in Taiwan require that the students should read content-area textbooks in English and the science courses in the students’ fields of specialization should also be presented in English. Unfortunately, many vocational senior high graduates enter higher education are under-prepared for the reading demands and thus might be unwilling to read. As educational theory and proclaims have demonstrated, nearly all of us agree that good teachers make a difference. One important aspect of planning and organizing for instruction is acquiring an understanding of the students. However, it is usually the teacher’s subjective school-related knowledge which subjectively determines for what happens in the classroom.
This study aimed to rethink what an EFL teacher should do for the EAP course by investigating the learners’ reading difficulties and needs, based on the open-ending survey responses of 47 engineering majors and 59 English majors. The qualitative data provided the analysis and interpretations from the learners’ own voices. The results revealed that most of the participants struggled to master their subject disciplines with content-matter constraints and inadequate linguistic proficiency, in which vocabulary problem was the most overwhelming obstacle. Moreover, teacher facilitation was ranked as the most helpful factor that motivated the learners to learn.
Thus, the teacher’s roles in understanding students’ needs, and engaging them in their academic reading includes: (1) pre-teaching frequently occurred terminology teaching and sentence structures, and highlighting key points;(2) bridging gap between the general English reading and academic reading by incorporating strategies with EAP reading; (3)expanding technical university students’ vocabulary size and knowledge; (4) activating appropriate schema by asking warm-up questions and directing students to relate their prior knowledge to the content; (5) selecting textbook/material with proper difficulty level and less complicated sentence structures, clear organization and layout.; (6) involving students in both extensive and intensive reading of texts that are discipline-specific.
Key Words:- content-area textbooks in English, EAP courses,
Biodata: Ming-Yueh Shen is an associate professor at the Department of Applied Foreign Languages of National Formosa University in Taiwan. Her research interests include developing reading/writing literacy for EFL learners, vocabulary acquisition, learner autonomy, and reading strategies instruction
contact asian_efl_journal@yahoo.com
|
xx