| Interest in the study of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) readers' reading English texts for academic purposes has been growing over the past decades. Among the many endeavors in this line of research, the majority of studies have been conducted with the quantitative research approach or one-time investigations. Research which has documented how EFL university students perceive their academic English reading is scant. Therefore, this study aims to explore what EFL undergraduate students' stories of reading academic English materials suggest about the nature of EFL reading for academic purposes. Focusing on EFL students' perceptions of their lived experience, this study adopted the notion of metacognition, as the core framework of this study, to understand how EFL undergraduate students' perceptions of their academic English reading developed over time and how these students adjusted their reading strategy use to read English for academic purposes over time. In order to obtain a deep and broad understanding of whether and how EFL students made meanings of their reading practice, this study employed a multiple case study approach, involving three Taiwanese university students with diverse profiles for a full academic year. The data were gathered via surveys, follow-up interviews, on-site observations and textual documents. The cross-study analysis of the participants' self-reports was conducted through color coding to capture the shared and differential accounts. Results of this study indicated the dynamics of EFL reading for academic purposes. To conclude, this study provides L2 reading teachers and disciplinary teachers pedagogical suggestions built on a better understanding of the participants' metacognitive development of their L2 reading for academic purposes. |
