Exploring Problems Experienced by Malay Learners of Arabic in Reading: Implications for Strategic Instruction

The purpose of this article is to examine whether and how reading strategies can be successfully taught in second or foreign language reading instruction. A number of researchers agree that it is important for second or foreign language readers to become ‘strategic’ readers. Yet, there is disagreement among these same researchers as to how to accomplish this goal. Part of the problem is that there are no inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ reading strategies. What is a good strategy in one situation for one reader, may be a bad strategy in a different situation or for a different reader. Successful and unsuccessful strategy use is apparently context and text dependent. In this article I present a comprehensive survey of the research which has been done on reading strategy training, and confront the critical issue of how to make reading strategy instruction appropriately text and context sensitive rather than the mindless teaching of lists of strategies.