The Preference and Effectiveness of Activities in English Reading Class: From University Students' Perspectives

The purpose of this study is to investigate university students' preference to and effectiveness of activities implemented in reading classes. The participants were 153 freshman students taking two-hour English reading class every week and the data were collected from survey. The findings indicated that the participants strongly favored the instructor's teaching, and vocabulary and sentence quiz along with the opportunity of their presentation. The participants considered listening to reading text relatively effective for improving English and less effective for text comprehension. The text-information reorganization activity was considered the least effective for either improving English or text comprehension. Regarding the effectiveness of summary, the participants positively evaluated this activity for improving English and text comprehension. The more proficient the participants are, the more positively they evaluated the activity. The participants preferred individual activities to cooperative group activities such as summary and text-information reorganization. Given the results, this study provides some implications to consider how to implement a variety of activities in college reading class.