The Impact of Text Structure Awareness on ESP Learners’ Reading Comprehension Case Study: Accounting and Finance at the University of Ghardaia

Abstract

This thesis aims to study of the relationship between text structure awareness and ESP learners’ reading comprehension, within a discourse-based approach. 53 Accounting and Finance students from the University of Ghardaia were involved in this study. The researcher adopted a triangulated approach by conducting classroom discussions as a first step for having an idea about the students’ learning problems, a questionnaire for the sake of gaining insights on the students’ reading habits and experiences: what they read, how they comprehend texts, and whether they use reading comprehension strategies or not. A pre-test was distributed to the students as a third step to check the students’ comprehension of a text by answering comprehension questions and doing some tasks related to the text. The subjects, next, received a five-session treatment during five weeks. The intervention consisted of dealing with texts in the content area of the subjects, focusing, in the main, on teaching the text structure awareness strategy which resulted in summarising texts in graphic organisers and, then, in paragraphs. Comprehension questions, True/False and fill in the gaps tasks were also included. After that, the subjects had a post-test including the same items as in the pre-test. The scores of the post-test were higher than the ones of the pre-test. The results showed a significant improvement in the text structure awareness strategy, which proved the efficiency of the suggested approach. We conducted, as a last step, a T-test which confirmed our hypothesis that text structure awareness fosters ESP learners’ reading comprehension.