A Triangulated Approach to Reading Strategy Use: Do General and Academic Reading Materials Make a Difference?

This paper was an attempt to explore the reading strategy use of Iranian M.A. students with general and discipline-related texts. More specifically, this was an endeavor to see if relation to discipline affects the reading strategy use of the students. To this end, a Nelson test and the reading comprehension section of TOEFL were used to select sixty-five power engineering and physics M.A. students at Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) to participate in the study. Given the mixed-methods nature of the study, both quantitative, Survey of Reading Strategy Use (SORS), and qualitative, think-aloud protocol, procedures were followed. The participants based their responses to SORS and the think-aloud procedure on the reading comprehension section of TOEFL test and two discipline-related reading comprehension tests. By and large, analysis of these two procedures suggested that reading strategy use did not differ significantly across general and discipline-related texts, as long as power engineering and physics students are concerned. Additionally, whereas power engineering students used strategies more frequently with general reading texts, physics students resorted to strategies more frequently with discipline-related texts.