Vocabulary knowledge: Malaysian tertiary level learners' major problem in summary writing

The ability to summarize and paraphrase written pieces is one of the essential skills tertiary level students need in order to succeed in their academic endeavor. It involves the process of decoding a text, and then re-encoding it by making changes to the structure and vocabulary of the original text while maintaining its content. The present study analyzes a group of tertiary level students’ written samples to diagnose their main areas of difficulty in writing business report summaries. For this purpose, a sample of 69 samples was collected from an intact group of learners. Two raters used an analytic writing scale to score the samples individually. Based on the results, majority of the students (about 70%) achieved ‘excellent to very good’ scores for the ‘content’ of their written samples. However, regarding the ‘organization’ and ‘vocabulary’ of their written pieces, respectively 75% and 97% of these students scored ‘Fair to poor’. ‘Good to average’ results were achieved for a majority of the students’ ‘language use’ and ‘mechanics’ skills. The findings of the present study accentuate the urgent need for remedy courses to help these students improve their organization and vocabulary skills in ESL writing. Further research is necessary to diagnose the learners’ difficulty areas in other genres of writing such as argumentative and narrative modes

The Effect of Familiarity with Content Knowledge on Iranian Medical Students’ Performance in Reading Comprehension Texts: A Comparative Study of Medical and TEFL Students

This study considers the effect of relevant background knowledge (schema) on reading comprehension in a group of Iranian medical students. The participants were selected using random sampling from two different groups: thirty students enrolled in an MA course in TEFL, and thirty medical students in years 4 to 7 of a seven year medical course. The selection requirement for all participants was an IELTS score of between 6 and 7. All participants were asked to respond to two texts. The first was an academic text with a tendency towards using sub-technical medical terms (e.g. asthma, air ventilation), and which was part of a sample text for an IELTS reading skill test. The second text contained highly technical or subject-specific medical terms from neurology as a specific area of medicine. Both texts were selected by a medical specialist who had also taught English for Medical Purposes (EMP) for several years in medical colleges in Iran. After reading each text, students were asked to answer questions based on the text. The results obtained from an analysis of the scores using SPSS indicated that background knowledge plays an important role in text reading comprehension for medical students in Iran (p< 0.05). The study also considered the three phases of reading (pre-reading, reading, and post-reading) and ways to build and activate background knowledge (schema) to achieve better reading comprehension