Extensive Reading as an Approach to Foster Reading Comprehension in Engineering Students in Agronomy

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation of extensive reading as an approach to enhance the comprehension of specialized texts in the area of agronomy in a public university on the southern part of Mexico. Some reading strategies such as: summarizing, identifying main ideas, creating mental images or visualizing and drawing inferences or reading between the lines were implemented in a reading comprehension class, combined with extensive reading. The results revealed that the students enjoyed reading texts from other areas and felt confident when reading agronomy specialized texts. Their comprehension of texts in the area increased in a significant percentage.