Extensive reading and reading comprehension

Abstract

The current study analyzed students ' perspectives on extensive reading in the reading comprehension. A total of 65 university students from the “Centro de Idiomas” (23 males and 42 females) with a B1 level participated in a descriptive, non-experimental investigation. Data was collected through a survey with 18 items on a Likert scale and 3 open-ended questions. It was validated by Cronbach's Alpha coefficient (0.951) and validated by experts. Moreover, the research was based on three research questions based on the objectives. The results revealed that the types of reading most promoted in class were perceptive reading and extensive reading. Perceptive reading allows them to recognize different elements of a passage such as letters, symbols, punctuation marks. And extensive reading allows them to read texts for pleasure. However, interactive reading was the most used by the majority of students to improve reading comprehension. The materials most used by students to develop extensive reading were comics and graded readers. The literary genres that students preferred were fiction and horror. There were some extensive reading strategies that help with reading comprehension. Most students preferred to use activation and use of prior knowledge and visualizing. However, summarizing was also considered a useful strategy to improve reading comprehension since students combine details from a text to express them in their own words.