Reading has always been an important skill for university students in order for them to gain access to knowledge in the academic books. Despite this, many students who view reading in English as important do not actually engage themselves in English reading activities outside class hours. Reading for pleasure allows learners to acquire certain language skills. Therefore, an experimental study using reading for pleasure was conducted. The experimental group was exposed to reading for pleasure for 5 weeks, while the other group was not. However, the control group showed better improvement of comprehension skills in the post test. Whereas, the pre-test scores results were nearly the same. The reasons for this are explained in the discussion that follows. From questionnaires distributed, a substantial number of subjects (79%) said that reading for pleasure would help them to understand the text better and they would pursue reading for pleasure. It is hoped that this small-scale study would highlight the effect of reading for pleasure in improving the students’ reading comprehension skills. Future researchers should cover an experimental study which is of longer duration. A period of six months is suggested
It is generally agreed that collocational knowledge is an important language form for language learners in order for them to be proficient and fluent in the target language. However, previous studies have reported that second language (L2) learners lack collocational competence and they encounter difficulties in learning and using collocations. The present study not only investigates the overall collocational knowledge of Malaysian ESL learners, but more specifically, their productive and receptive knowledge of lexical and grammatical, which so far have not been further explored. Additionally, the ESL learners’ performance on three different types of collocations: verb-noun, adjective-noun, and verb-preposition is also investigated. Results of the study reveals a few interesting findings with respect to the Malaysian ESL learners’ overall knowledge of collocations, in particular their productive and receptive knowledge of collocations in relation to the three different types of collocations (verb-noun, adjective-noun, and verb-preposition). Pedagogical implications with regard to collocations and recommendations for future research are also put forward. investigated both the receptive and productive aspects of collocational.
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