EFL Students’ Perceptions of Top-down and Bottom-up Reading Strategies and Reading Comprehension

[[abstract]]Over the last few decades, researchers have given attention to the effects of reading strategies on EFL reading comprehension. Although much work has been done to date, more studies need to be conducted to understand EFL students’ perceptions of bottom-up and top-down reading strategies in EFL reading. Accordingly, the purpose of this report is to deepen our understanding of EFL learners’ perceptions of the use of bottom-up and top-reading strategies during the reading process. The method to follow out in this study was a semi-structure interview, which included questions that six senior high school students were expected to respond anonymously in light of the reading strategies that they applied in the process of English reading. The participants were selected from five public and one private high school in central Taiwan. The qualitative analysis of the in-depth interviews was to understand students’ feelings and thoughts concerning English reading comprehension through the use of bottom-up and top-down reading strategies. The findings of the study suggested that lexical recognition and syntactic knowledge are indispensable for EFL high school readers to better their reading comprehension. Therefore, the findings and implications of the study lead us to believe that integrating reading strategies instruction into language courses potentially impact EFL learners’ reading comprehension as well as enhance our further understanding regarding learners’ perceptions of bottom-up and top-down reading strategies they utilized in reading comprehension