The Role of Reading in an Integrated Reading-to-Write Task: A Think-Aloud Study of EFL Undergraduate English Language Students in a Saudi Context

Whilst reading and writing are taught separately in certain EFL contexts, recent research shows that reading and writing are interdependent skills (Kuzborska, 2015). Students are often asked to read and then write for their assignments in various academic contexts. Second-language reading processes could play an important role in eliciting integrated writing performance (Plakans & Gebril, 2012; Zhao & Hirvela, 2015). Although much of the focus of previous research has been on the writing aspect of the reading-writing connection, a review of the literature shows that studies on the role of reading in reading-to-write tasks have been increasing (Zhao & Hirvela, 2015). There is therefore still a need for more research on the role of reading in tasks.
Saudi undergraduate EFL Students are required to perform reading-to-write tasks, particularly in the final years of their studies. However, a review of the research in the Saudi EFL context shows that there has been only one empirical study which has investigated the role of reading in reading-to-write tasks (Alhujaylan, 2020), and another study which only discussed the topic theoretically (Al-Omrani, 2014).
This case study was therefore designed to bridge this gap and focused on the role of reading in reading-to-write tasks in a Saudi university. Ten undergraduate students completed a reading-to-write task to determine the reading processes they used when undertaking the task in order to compare the differences in the use of reading processes between high- and low-scoring writers and to explore the factors affecting the students’ reading and writing performance. This study used the think-aloud protocol, pre- and post-protocol interviews, and students’ essays to answer the research questions.
The results of this study show that comprehension processes were almost absent from students’ reading. All of the students, both high- and low-scoring writers, mostly used linguistic processes. Some comprehension reading processes (such as monitoring and text structure) were only used by high-scoring writers, and the most used linguistic processes such as propositional meaning formation, lexical access and syntactic parsing were used by both high- and low-scoring students. The findings suggest that the formation of propositional meanings, rather than the focus on individual words, might contribute to writing performance. The findings also suggest that beliefs play an important role in reading and writing performance. Beliefs guide students’ reading and writing behaviour and can negatively influence their reading and writing outcome. These findings carry valuable recommendations for teaching reading-to-write tasks in the Saudi context.