The purpose of this study is to investigate in-depth high school students’ strategy use in reading English texts of College Scholastic Ability Test (KSAT). This study employed a think-aloud method to look into the reading process by task types and by reading proficiency. Six high school students, three high-level and three low-level readers, were asked to perform reading tasks of three types, ‘finding a theme’, ‘filling the gap’, ‘finding an irrelevant sentence & inserting a sentence’, thinking out loud after training. The results are as follows. First, the participants used varied types of reading strategies regardless of top-down/bottom-up. ‘Guessing from the context’ and ‘paraphrasing in L1’, were most frequently used, and ‘using schema’ and ‘sensing the logical organization’ were least used.’ Second, different strategy use patterns were shown by task types: Far more strategies were used in ‘finding a theme’ than the others, especially, attending to keyword. Third, the high-level readers employed more reading strategies than the low-level counterparts. Furthermore, the strategy use pattern was very different between groups: The low-level readers seldom used ‘checking discourse markers,’ ‘synthesizing information,’ and ‘questioning’ that the high level readers commonly used.

This present study borrows the framework of action research as a tool for improving the quality of instruction in a university reading comprehension course by reflecting previous and current teaching practices, by incorporating students’ feedback and preferences, and by intervening students’ beliefs and strategy use. In doing so, the study examines the potential effects and problems of strategy-based instruction in the reading comprehension tasks that integrate TETE in collaborative, task-based learning environment. The students were assigned to the training of two different types of strategies in terms of language processing: paraphrasing vs. translation strategies in a TETE class. A total of 107 students from two reading comprehension courses were asked to take a TOEFL and answer a self-report questionnaire both at the beginning and at the end of the semester. While students’ use of metacognitive and cognitive strategies increased significantly, their use of translation strategies and beliefs about translation were persistent to change as the students seemed to regard translation an important tool for reading comprehension. A follow-up interview and course evaluation were also used for triangulating the quantitative findings. It is suggested that the role of L1 in language classes should be revisited and the English-only policy be reconsidered.