Why don’t they read the way they should? By Radha Nambiar- Gopal,Phd

Reading in the Malaysian primary and secondary school system is largely a master of skill mastery and school textbooks, workbooks and even examinations are a testament to this approach. The teacher of reading is often forced to make the choice of training her learners to read and answer comprehension questions for examination purposes. Reading in the university, in contrast is much more cognitively demanding, especially for content study. The university student has to read actively and engage with the text, glean important information critically and synthesize information from a variety of related texts for academic writing assignments and discussions. There appears to be a mismatch between what the learners can do as a result of limited training in school and what they are expected to do for academic reading in the university. This study sets out to investigate how the learners read and what learning strategies they were using to complete a summary task. Think alouds were employed to gain insights into the learners’ processing of the text and this was done individually with each learner. Interviews were then conducted with each learner and each learner’s oral summary was also examined to help understand strategy use. The findings of the study revealed certain patterns in the learners ’ processing of a text and these are discussed as the four syndromes. As educators there is an urgent need for us to reconsider the way reading is taught and an understanding of what learners do to help them make sense of a text is a good place to begin