چکیده:
The objectives of this study were to investigate Engineering students’ attitudes and problems in academic reading comprehension and to determine the contribution of academic reading attitude, breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge to academic reading comprehension. The participants were 122 undergraduate students of Engineering at Iran University of Science and Technology. The Vocabulary Levels Test, the Word Associates Test, a reading section of an academic IELTS sample followed by one open-ended question about reading problems, and an academic reading attitude survey were the instruments of this study. The results of the study showed that (a) the global value the learners placed on the academic reading was the most frequent factor in their attitude towards academic reading; (b) the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge were the statistically significant contributors to academic reading, while the contribution of attitude to academic reading was not statistically significant; and (c) ‘weak vocabulary knowledge’ was the most frequent problem reported by the learners.
خلاصه ماشینی:
g. , Qian, 1999, 2002; Shen, 2008); however, there seems to be no research on the academic reading attitude and contribution of the depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge to the comprehension of academic texts by undergraduate students of Engineering.
The purposes of this study thus were (a) to explore the undergraduate students’ problems and attitudes about academic reading and (b) to determine the contribution of the depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge to academic reading.
Research Question 3: To what extent do attitude, breadth, and depth of vocabulary knowledge correlate to academic reading comprehension?
Research Question 4: To what extent do attitude, depth, and breadth dimensions of vocabulary knowledge contribute to performance in academic reading comprehension?
As Laufer, Elder, Hill, and Congdon (2004) argue, success in reading, writing, general language proficiency, placement tests, and admission to teaching programs can be determined by vocabulary size.
For this purpose, 83 Iranian first-year university students (22 males and 61 females) participated in the study, and the reading comprehension section of TOEFL was used to assess the leaners’ reading proficiency, and the Vocabulary Levels Tests (Nation, 1990) was used to determine the size of their vocabulary knowledge.
Research Design This study was conducted using a quantitative and qualitative research methodology to illustrate the contribution of attitude, depth, and breadth of vocabulary knowledge to academic reading comprehension.
Table 8: ANOVA Results of the Attitude, Depth, and Breadth of Vocabulary Knowledge to Academic Reading {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} a.