Abstract:

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has developed from a quiet backwater to a major international presence in little more than twenty-five years. And in that time the education system has struggled to keep up. Schools can be loosely classified as government or private. The former are undergoing a steady transformation from an entirely Arabic, knowledge-transmission focus to a more modern approach (“Now It’s Time,” 2014). The popular private schools tend to be expensive and increasingly hard to gain access to. Through the initiatives of the UAE education system, parents are being encouraged to be more involved with their children’s education (Sabry & Zaman, 2012). Reading skills are now recognized as essential and frequently discussed in the media. Even so, on average, Arabs read as little as four pages of literature a year (Swan and Ahmed, 2011). And, nationwide, including at university level, the majority of students tend to be reluctant readers; this is a national concern. Through the use of questionnaires and interviews with both students and faculty, this research aimed to find out how students with weak reading skills cope at university. Is the process of gaining a university qualification made more difficult for reluctant readers? What strategies do they employ to complete tasks that require extensive reading? Can they scrape through or even manage respectable grades while avoiding reading? Students are ingenious: of course they can do it – some of them.

Keywords:

Freshman students, reading, Arab students, ESOL students.