Taiwanese TVES Business-Major Graduate Students' Reading Difficulties and Strategy Use

In Taiwan, due to globalization, developing English for academic purposes (EAP) abilities and performing EAP tasks are becoming more and more important for Taiwanese EFL learners, especially graduate students who are often required to read English academic material and get published in international journals. However, EAP-related studies in Taiwan are still in their embryonic stage, and few studies have attempted to investigate Taiwanese EAP readers' needs and difficulties. In addition, how graduate students in the Technological and Vocational Education System (TVES) employ reading strategies when they read English academic material is rarely explored. Thus, this study aims to investigate the reading strategies and difficulties of TVES business-major graduate students when they read English material for academic purposes. This study adopted convenient sampling; a total of 314 TVES business-major graduate students participated in the study. The questionnaire of reading difficulty consisted of 20 items, further divided into text-based and reader-based difficulties. In addition, Mokhtari and Sheorey's (2002) Survey of Reading Strategy (SORS) was adopted to assess the subjects' reading strategy use. SORS, which is a five-point Likertscale questionnaire, was further categorized into three types: global, problem solving and support strategies. The results show, firstly, that the difficulties the subjects always or usually encountered during reading mostly belong to textbased difficulties. Second, the TVES business-major graduate students used reading strategies at a high level; moreover, among the three types of reading strategies, learners tended to rely on support strategies the most, followed by problem-solving strategies and then global strategies.

並列關鍵字

EAP reading ； reading difficulties ； reading strategies ； Technological and Vocational Education System (TVES)

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