Abstract:

Nowadays, having access to the European labour market opportunities implies having a high command of English. For this reason, many Spanish universities are implementing English teaching within their educational policies and are starting to offer the possibility of studying some of their degrees and master courses in English. Learning at university strongly depends on the subject's own comprehension monitoring when reading instructional materials, usually expository texts. In this context, it seems important to study what kind of understanding difficulties university students may find when they deal with learning materials in English as a foreign language. In the present work, comprehension monitoring (CM) of university students, with an advance English proficiency level (C1), is assessed. Two related empirical studies were carried out: the second one aimed at replicating the first one in a different academic context. In Study 1, thirty-three post-graduate students of a Master Course of Secondary School Teacher Training in English as Foreign Language participated. They read three texts in English and three in Spanish in order to judge their comprehensibility. Following the error detection paradigm micro and macro-structural inconsistencies were embedded in the texts. Results showed that students’ CM was better in Spanish than in English as expected but, in addition, an intriguing interaction effect CM-level X Language was found: in English, students’ Micro-structural CM was more efficient than their Macro-structural CM, whereas when reading in Spanish, the differences were in the opposite direction. Study 2 was conducted with twenty-six students of a Master Course in Applied Linguistics. Results replicated the interaction effect found in Study1. Although students had an advanced EFL level, differences between the two languages, especially at macro-structural level, still remained. This suggests that English teaching should be improved, at least in order to guarantee suitable comprehension of long texts. Results also suggest possible processing L1-FL differences. Although some hypotheses are offered to explain these differences, they should be intentionally contrasted in future studies.

Keywords:

Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Science Education, Science Texts, Comprehension Monitoring, University Students.