An investigation of reading comprehension program at a University of Technology

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the reading comprehension program at a University of Technology to understand whether the ESP course affects students' reading comprehension ability or not. To gather subjects, an OPT test was administered to 100 students bringing out 60 students in intermediate level of English proficiency. The participants were divided randomly into two groups of control and experimental. Then a pretest on reading comprehension was administered to insure the homogeneity of subjects and record what degree of implicit knowledge of comprehension they had. Next, 2 posttests were filled out by subjects after treatment process in which lasted for five sessions only for experimental group. The gathered data from subjects in both control and experimental groups were analyzed using independent samples t-test and ANCOVAs with the help of SPSS software. The data analysis revealed that the null hypothesis of the study is proved. Results indicated that learners who received reading comprehension strategies progress more in contrast to those who did not receive the strategies in control group. The progress in experimental group was significantly different from the control group.