Strategy use in advanced EFL readers: Identifying and characterizing the patterns of reading strategies employed by tertiary EFL students

The present study employed think-aloud methods to investigate the patterns of reading strategy use of good and weak advanced EFL readers and also the impact of different text types and text difficulty levels on strategy use. Eight good readers and eight weak readers read twelve texts using think-aloud techniques. The texts selected included two text types, causation and description; and two levels of text difficulty. The collected think-aloud protocols were analyzed to identify the strategies used by the participants, and to develop the Coding Scheme. The Coding Scheme developed includes forty identified strategies, classified into three categories---bottom-up, top-down, and metacognitive---according to their processing operations, which were further broken down into eleven subcategories based on their processing load and functional purposes.; The major findings indicated that good and weak readers knew and used the same strategies, and employed bottom-up strategies similarly. The key difference was the greater use of top-down strategies by good readers, which suggests that good readers are more concerned with achieving the overall meaning of the text. One surprising finding was that weak readers used metacognitive strategies more frequently. This finding can be explained in terms of the nature of monitoring activities.; The study also found that text type did not have an impact on the overall strategy use of good and weak readers, and only a slight impact on their choice of certain strategies. On the other hand, text difficulty had a strong impact on good readers' strategy use, but only a slight impact on weak readers'. This showed that good readers can flexibly adapt their wide repertoire of strategies to more difficult reading tasks but weak readers tended to read less flexibly.; Based on the findings, a Model of Advanced L2/FL Reading Strategies was proposed to account for strategy use of both good and weak readers, as well as the impact of text difficulty level and text type on their strategy use. The model developed appears to accommodate the complex and rich strategy use of the good and weak EFL readers in this study, and has potential for application to L2/FL readers who share more or less similar features. Finally, this dissertation discusses the theoretical and methodological significance of the study, and possible pedagogical implications to enhance students' strategy use.