An Investigation of Academic Reading Strategies among Thai Economics Students

Reading is one of the most important skills for language learners. Therefore, the reading strategies play a vital role for comprehending their reading tasks. The present study then investigated the reading strategies employed by Thai university students towards academic reading. The questionnaire, which based on the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (Oxford, 1990), and semi-structure interview were conducted for collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. The collected data then were analysed by using the descriptive statistics. Classified by category, the findings from the questionnaire indicated that affective strategies was rated at the most used strategy, whereas social strategies was reported the least use. Moreover, grouped by strategy, the highest used strategies was cognitive strategies, whereas social strategies was at the least level. In addition, the results from interviewing stated that scanning (cognitive strategies) was the most employed strategy, whereas reading a passage only one time with no focus was the least used. Moreover, summarizing (cognitive strategies) was the most useful strategy reported by the participants, while reading slowly with no focus was the useless technique for most of them. A further study should explore the relationship between the use of reading strategies and the perception towards the useful strategies.