An Identification and description of the reading strategies used by freshmen students through think-aloud protocols

ABSTRACT This study explored the processes involved in a reader's mind while searching for meaning through think-aloud protocols. In think-aloud procedure, subjects verbalize their thoughts during the solution of a task. The reason for using think-aloud protocols in this study was to determine the reading strategies of the participants. In doing so, the study was mainly concerned with identifying and describing reading strategies used by Freshmen students at the ELT Department, Faculty of Education, Çukurova University. A total of twenty freshmen students- ten of whom were exempted from the preparatory class and ten prep-studied were gathered into two different groups accordingly. These students were randomly chosen among those whose reading section scores of the proficiency exam were similar. At the beginning of the academic year, these two groups of readers were asked to read an authentic text and report their thinking and understanding while reading. Immediately after the think-aloud process, the subjects were asked to answer ten multiple choice questions in order to help the researcher to gain insight about the information comprehended by the participants. The verbalisations of the participants during the think-aloud process were audio-taped, and subsequently transcribed. In order to analyse the collected data, the researcher developed a taxonomy based on the reading strategies of the twenty participants. This research characterised 51 different strategies which were studied under five main categories, pre-reading, vocabulary, comprehension-gathering, comprehension-monitoring andevaluation. The results of this study indicate that exempted participants used much more strategies in terms of type and nature when compared with prep-studied participants. While there was no particular evidence indicating a significant difference between the two groups related to the frequency of the employed strategies which were identified throughout this research, with reference to means and standard deviations, more participants in Group B were found to be consistent related to that matter. Regarding the performance level of the participants in the multiple choice test, this study also revealed some of the strategies which successful participants had a tendency to use.