Experimenting with factors enhancing reading comprehension of media texts in university students majoring in IR studies

Abstract

The goal of the current paper is to trace the way text-structure knowledge (TSK) and TSK related activities incorporated in students’ experimental learning enhance reading comprehension (RC) strategies and contribute to higher comprehension indexes of contemporary media texts by B2+ level university students majoring in International Relations (IR) studies. The paper presents new notions of media text structure relating to text patterns, its general and specific information, topic sentence and main idea, text hierarchy levels etc. that hypothetically facilitates the perception of textual information and builds up a new cognitive mechanism in students. Research methods are thoroughly described in the article. Experimental data during the two-year period of 2018-2020 are submitted illustrating the most and the least developed RC strategies, those of drawing inferences and interpreting implicit information focusing on recognizing underlying assumptions being the least developed ones. Students’ RC levels from frustration and instructional to an independent one have been systematized. Statistics confirm that the chosen relationship between media text structure knowledge and effective RC strategies boost the accuracy of comprehension levels in ESP students, thus, proving the efficiency of this method.