A Study on Incorporating Narrow Reading Into Engineering Program Curriculum to Teach New Words

A Study on Incorporating Narrow Reading Into Engineering Program Curriculum to Teach New Words

Challa Srinivasa Rao, Suresh Babu Karayil
Copyright: © 2020 |Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-3464-9.ch004
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Abstract

This finds the possibility of incorporating narrow reading into the curriculum of engineering students. The success of incorporating narrow reading will be determined by the learning outcome of the students. The scores achieved by the students on standardized tests like GRE, TOEFL, and IELTS are considered a benchmark for attaining language skills. So, before taking up full-fledged research, this study intends to investigate if achievement scores can be correlated to the Narrow Reading habit of the students. A questionnaire was administered to the students to know the standard tests the students took, their reading habits and choices, titles of the books or stories they read and the authors of the works. Analysis of the responses collected through the questionnaire provided the foundation to the proposal of this paper to incorporate Narrow Reading into the curriculum of Engineering Education in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in India.
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Narrow Reading

Narrow Reading introduced by Krashen in 1985 aims at developing receptive and productive mastery of vocabulary knowledge. The student who reads using focused or narrow reading faces various contexts and sees frequent words related to that topic (Cho & Krashen, 1994; Krashen, 1981; Schmitt & Carter, 2000). When a student is exposed to new words repeatedly, it helps him in developing his vocabulary knowledge. Studies conducted in this area have shown that narrowly reading a series of related texts recycles vocabulary more effectively than randomly reading unrelated texts (Hwang & Nation, 1989; Rodgers & Webb, 2011). Further research has established the advantages of narrow reading.

Few of the advantages of narrow reading are:

  • 1.

    Narrow reading helps learners to build new vocabulary.

  • 2.

    Narrow reading shows better gains in both receptive and productive knowledge of vocabulary.

  • 3.

    Narrow reading helps to improve reading speed.

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Purpose Of The Research

The current research is designed keeping in view the learning requirements of the students who take up engineering education in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, India. The focus of the research is primarily on the students drawn from rural backgrounds with less significant exposure to English language usage during their secondary and higher secondary school tenure. The skill quotient of the students in the domain areas such as programming, drawing, designing etc. is at reasonably good levels. But it is the language competence of the students that empowers them to showcase their abilities.

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