Needs for and Problems about Academic English Reading of Veterinary Undergraduate Students at Kasetsart University

Abstract

English Reading is one of the essential skills for university students in numerous
disciplines. The reason for this is that most of academic literatures are published in English (Alderson, 1989). This study aims to investigate the needs and problems in reading academic materials in English of veterinary undergraduate students at Kasetsart University and to explore the strategies they used when reading English materials. The sample of this study was 100 third-year veterinary students at Kasetsart University. The instruments for data collection were a questionnaire and an interview. The data gained from the questionnaire survey were analyzed statistically using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences program (SPSS).

The results indicated that the veterinary students greatly needed to read
textbooks, research articles, research journals, and research reports of their discipline in English. The main purposes for reading these materials were to gain information for conducting a seminar paper and for doing a report. The students’ significant barriers for English reading were general terms and technical terms. In contrast, grammatical knowledge was the least serious problem for them. The most frequent strategy used when unknown words were found was consulting a dictionary. The strategy used the least was reading aloud when the text became hard to understand.