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Fostering Strategy Use in a Reading-Based Course in EFL Academic Context: Students’ Perspectives

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Book cover Studying Second Language Acquisition from a Qualitative Perspective

Part of the book series: Second Language Learning and Teaching ((SLLT,volume 27))

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Abstract

The present paper reports on a small-scale qualitative study whose primary goal was to obtain an evaluation of a one-term subject-specific course in EFL Didactics provided to a group of graduate students of an English Department in Poland. The course was designed with a view to fostering the students’ use of a combination of strategies while reading academic texts and learning from them. The performance of tasks involving notetaking, generating questions and summarizing required a fair amount of systematic written work on the part of the participants of the study. Such a procedure gave the students an opportunity to heighten their awareness of the role reading strategies can play in the development of subject-specific knowledge—the general learning objective of the course—as well as in dealing with some language problems. The basic research tool used in the study was a questionnaire developed to elicit the students’ opinions and comments on the quality of the experience they gained while participating in the course. The final conclusions provide some suggestions as to the improvement of the course as well as regarding further research into strategy use in EFL academic settings.

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Correspondence to Halina Chodkiewicz .

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Chodkiewicz, H. (2014). Fostering Strategy Use in a Reading-Based Course in EFL Academic Context: Students’ Perspectives. In: Gabryś-Barker, D., Wojtaszek, A. (eds) Studying Second Language Acquisition from a Qualitative Perspective. Second Language Learning and Teaching, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08353-7_4

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