British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News and Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This research analyzed students' perspectives on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News website in the development of reading comprehension. Sixty-one students (37 females and 24 males) from Centro de Idiomas of Universidad Técnica de Ambato participated in the study. The research was descriptive non-experimental and a survey comprised of 22 items with a Likert scale was used; it was also validated by Cronbach's Alpha coefficient (0.94), by Aiken's V coefficient (0,80) that allowed to determine the relevance of the items based on the assessment of 5 experts. In addition, the survey was based on three research questions related to the specific objectives. The results showed that half of the students do not use the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) News website for their reading comprehension development. However, it can be pointed out that students who use BBC News prefer to use news reading materials pertaining to the area of science and technology and current news readings. Likewise, the students' reading comprehension levels were analyzed, where the most developed was the inferential level of reading comprehension, indicating a strong ability to use previous knowledge to understand the text. Finally, the reading comprehension strategy used the most by students is the metacognitive strategy of self-monitoring. However, the least used strategy by the students was the cognitive strategy of note-taking. Although this is considered one of the most common strategies when reading to remember information, the results were the opposite. This could be due to the lack of practice of these strategies during the students' academic training, or students may not be familiar with effective note-taking methods, such as diagrams or keywords.