Research focus

The interview was conducted after the think-aloud session. The subjects were asked to comment on their general reading styles in Polish and in English, not only those manifested during the think-aloud session. Additionally, the readers were asked to comment on the think-aloud technique. In this chapter, we focus only on the results concerning students’ reading styles.

Results

7.2.1. Students’ individual styles of reading in relation to the Polish and the English text

The interviews encouraged the subjects to describe their styles of reading each text. Additional data was obtained about the students’ idiosyncratic styles of reading in relation to L1 reading and FL reading (see Stage 4). Furthermore, the analysis helped to account for the results of the quantitative evaluation of the students’ comprehension presented above (see Stage 5). The results also highlighted factors that could have contributed to the students’ reading performance. The most important findings concerning some of the students are discussed in Appendix 3. Conclusions concerning all the subjects are presented below.

All the subjects were able to enumerate and describe aspects which they considered the most important in how they read each text. In most cases, the students saw differences between how they read the Polish text and how they read the English text (in the summary below marked as “d”).