Enhancing Struggling Undergraduate Students' English Reading Proficiency through Local and Global Online Learning Resources Enhancing Struggling Undergraduate Students' English Reading Proficiency through Local and Global Online Learning Resources

Abstract

This study reports the success of an innovative English reading course for non-English majors at university. Teaching English to majors in other subjects than English is increasingly important these days in many countries (including Taiwan) where English has little local currency but which set their sights on becoming fully competitive in a globalized world where English dominates as the language of commerce and international affairs. However, the best way to prepare today's graduates in general for this challenge is far less reported and researched than the teaching of English to English majors. The dedicated cotaught reading course developed at HungKuang synthesizes a number of features that have been separately shown to be successful, including a reading circle approach to foster interest, encouragement of extensive reading out of class to foster learning through reading  and a blended approach to support reading both in class and online. To maximize input, the researcher exploited a Chinese medium version of the local CoolEnglish eLearning resource to serve as a scaffolding platform to complement an American Lexile based approach to extensive reading via the global English medium Scholastic eLearning platform. The latter assists in grading input so that it is comprehensible.   Test and questionnaire results from 52 students showed a significant increase in reading proficiency, especially among those who were relatively lower in proficiency at the start. There were high levels of student approval of the course. In particular, greater Lexile improvement was associated with use of more English related websites and a greater degree of positive attitude to the instruction.