As Korea develops very rapidly, the number of foreign students who go to Korea for future study, especially foreign students for academic purpose is growing rapidly. Although they entered into the graduate school in Korea with high Korean proficiency,...
As Korea develops very rapidly, the number of foreign students who go to Korea for future study, especially foreign students for academic purpose is growing rapidly. Although they entered into the graduate school in Korea with high Korean proficiency, because they cannot read the theses effectively, they are still facing many difficulties. Therefore, this paper conducted the study by focusing on the thesis reading strategies.
This paper is aimed to present the educational implication of the thesis reading strategies for the Chinese learners, by revealing the differences in the comparison of the reading strategies used by 50 Chinese learners with academic purpose and 20 Korean graduates students.
This paper conducted the analysis through survey. The collected questionnaires were analyzed through SPSS.19 statistical program. T-test was conducted in order to figure out the differences of the reading strategies used by those two groups.
The results can be summarized as follows. When reading the thesis, strategies like “predicting the results from the title”, “understanding the words from the context”, “using the background knowledge”, “summarizing and assessing”, “using the previous studies”, “learning the contents through graphs and pictures”, “exchanging opinions with others”, and “asking professors about the contents that they don’t understand” were used more by Korean graduate students. Strategies like “grammatical strategies” and “modifying the reading speed” were well used by the Chinese students. On the other hand, Korean graduate students, as native speakers, used the strategy “vitalizing background knowledge” more so as to carry out the academic study. In addition, their active learning attitude can be also seen. Meanwhile, Chinese graduate students have reached advanced level in Korean proficiency, but it can be predicted that because of lack of thesis reading strategies, they understand the thesis very passively.
This paper presented simply the education implications focusing on top-down strategy, assistive strategy and social strategy with the purpose of helping Chinese graduate students read thesis effectively.
First of all, it is necessary for the tutors to teach the students top-down strategy for foreign students’ effective thesis reading. Tutors should introduce the implications and structure of the thesis, and help the students learn about the background knowledge related to the thesis by reading more usually. Moreover, when reading thesis, learners should do many exercises of predicting the meaning of the new words or grammar from the context.
Secondly, it is necessary to teach the academic learners meta-cognitive strategy to read the thesis actively. Learners should identify the thesis contents by inquiry or summarizing during the reading process so as to cultivate the meta-cognitive strategy. In addition, it is good to organize and present their shortcomings after reading an appropriate academic text in order to cultivate the learners’ critical reading ability.
Thirdly, as for the assisitive strategy, tutors should emphasize the role of the bibliography and teach them the method of using the bibliography. Furthermore, because the pictures and graphs from the thesis reflect the research contents, it is necessary to conduct exercises of reading in a short time.
Fourthly, academic Korean learners should actively use the social strategy including discussion and inquiry in order to adapt to the study in the graduate school in Korea. The tutors should actively lead the learners by the way of inquiry, suggestion and presentation.
It is hoped that through this paper, the importance of the thesis reading strategy can be well recognized and the strategies that should be mastered when reading can be helpful in the thesis reading education.