NURTURING READING IN EFL HIGHER EDUCATION : Pedagogy, Practice and Impact From Academic Mandate to Self-Regulated Reading Habits

NAMA PENULIS : Achmad Hilal Madjdi, Rusiana, Agung Dwi Nurcahyo
ISBN : Proses
JUMLAH HALAMAN : 151 Halaman
UKURAN : 15.5 × 23 c CM
Sinopsis : As teacher educators, the author constantly confronted a disturbing paradox: although our pre-service teacher candidates had studied English since elementary school and had successfully navigated nearly two years of university-level English coursework, their actual reading volume in the target language remained staggeringly low. When confronted with English-medium texts, they struggled not with a lack of intellectual capacity, but with a deep-seated lack of a reading habit. They read only to survive exams, decode isolated comprehension questions, and satisfy specific, micro-level classroom tasks.
These pre-service teacher candidates are supposed to attain an exemplary level of linguistic competency and well-established literacy practices as their future classroom behaviors will directly influence the reading habits, vocabulary acquisition and language proficiency of thousands of primary and secondary school pupils.
But the day-to-day life of the tertiary classroom often reveals a yawning gulf between what is academically expected and what students really do. As teacher educators, the authors were repeatedly struck by a disconcerting and recurring paradox surrounding the literacy profiles of these teacher candidates. They had successfully finished nearly two years of university English and had studied the language as a required subject since they were in elementary school, but their actual amount of reading in the target language was still shockingly low. This disconnect poses a key question: why does ten years of formal education not lead to engaged, autonomous readers?
To understand this crisis, one must deconstruct the EFL "studied-but-unread" paradox and distinguish between linguistic decoding capacity and established literacy habits. When confronted with English-medium texts, these pre-service teachers struggled not from a lack of innate intellectual or cognitive capacity, but rather from a profound, deep-seated lack of a reading habit. They were highly capable of deconstructing individual sentences and translating difficult lexis when directly prompted by an instructor, but they lacked the cognitive stamina, reading fluency, and dispositional habit of mind required to voluntarily engage with long-form texts.