Developing Academic Reading at Tertiary Level: A Longitudinal Study Tracing Conceptual Change.

Abstract

This paper describes how classroom intervention, through developing process awareness of reading, helped change students' model of reading with a socially constructed, explicit one. It then shows the impact the changes in students' reading models had on their literacy experiences in other courses of their degree. The twenty-five participants were native speakers of Cantonese enrolled in an undergraduate degree in "Contemporary English Language" at a Hong Kong university. They attended tutorials every fortnight to discuss set readings of academic articles and book chapters for a course entitled "Language and Society". Data were gathered by audio recording classes, collating learning journal entries, and conducting in-depth interviews. The data were inductively analyzed to find emerging themes following a reiterative process of substantiating and elaborating the themes. Initially students considered word-for-word decoding the only way to read, and as they were shown how to read selectively and purposefully, students' implicit models of 'good' reading became increasingly explicit in which reading was seen as an active process entailing complex interactions between readers, writers and text. However, data also showed that such process models of reading needed contextual support if they were to have a role in students' literacy experiences outside the sheltered ESL classroom.

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