Academic success greatly depends on the ability of students to capitalise the information available at their disposal through improved reading skills. However, the emergence of digital texts has transformed the nature of academic reading as online reading is reported to be different from traditional printed reading. As such, this paper which is based on a study conducted on students in a particular university in Malaysia, was written to investigate the extent of the use of strategies when reading online, in an academic setting and also to investigate whether differences in the use of the strategies between students in different field of studies exist. Findings suggest that students are all users of strategies and field of studies has no bearing on the type of overall strategies preferred. However, significant difference was found for support strategies. One of the implications is the need for class instruction in raising students' awareness on the importance of varied usage of strategies when reading materials online.

Contribution/ Originality: This study is one of very few studies which have investigated beliefs about learning Arabic among students training to be ESL teachers. What makes the study different is the fact that the respondents have no prior formal instruction in Arabic but are already familiar with Arabic through daily religious rituals and through native language which contains numerous Arabic loan words.

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Sentence variety is a fundamental aspect in writing to avoid stereotypes, thus making writing more interesting. However, ESL students are often found not using the different sentence structures in writing. Students seem to learn one basic pattern and stick to it. The reason could be due to lack of knowledge and practice to write a variety of sentence structures. They seem to be reluctant to learn more about it, and teachers are reluctant to teach. Despite being fundamental, little emphasis has been put on sentence variety in the ESL Writing classes because most of the time teachers and students think that as long as there are no grammatical errors, the writing is acceptable. Even with improvement, most of them may not really achieve encouraging results in writing. Hence, this study intended to examine the respondents' writing performance before and after using a sentence variety checklist, and to analyse the respondents' perceptions towards using the sentence variety checklist in their writing. Twenty university students from a pre-sessional English Language programme were selected to take part in this study and data were collected qualitatively from students' essays and their responses from a 20-item survey questionnaire. The findings revealed a slight improvement in students' writing. They also found the checklist made writing more interesting and made the students more aware of what they were writing. In conclusion, sentence variety checklist can be one of the tools for ESL students to boost students' writing performance.