Beyond Comprehension Exercises in the ESL Academic Reading Class

Abstract

Recent research in L1 reading and education has focused on cognitive and metacognitive strategies that can increase students' comprehension and learning of academic subject matter from written text. However, the insights from this work have had limited impact on academic purposes ESL curricula. ESL developmental reading courses continue to rely on such standard activities as comprehension and skill-building exercises. Study strategies may receive little attention or be taught generically. This article urges English for academic purposes (EAP) programs to devise more holistic, task- and text-specific, strategy-oriented approaches for reading instruction. Recommendations are given for selecting reading materials, defining criterion tasks, and providing strategy instruction to prepare intermediate- and advanced-level ESL students to meet the demands of reading assignments in secondary and postsecondary content classes.