A Preliminary Investigation of Saudi Students Strategies in EFL Reading

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an empirical study of Saudi Students' reading comprehension strategies revealed through the use of the 'think-aloud' technique. The findings indicate that the subjects of this study tend to employ low-level, bottom-up, language-based strategies. This overwhelming entanglement with text processing at the micro-level such as handling isolated unfamiliar words and phrases gets in the way of utilizing the cognitive higher-level top-down, knowledge-based strategies. The paper calls for well-prepared strategy training programs in the skill of automaticity of local low-level strategies which should be supplemented by extensive reading in the target language..