The English Language Education Department Students' Attitude Towards Reading Strategies for Academic Texts

Reading strategies is a specific action or technique taken by learners to improve their understanding of the reading process. Especially in reading academic texts where students must understand the meaning and context as a whole in order to get the intended knowledge. However, the use of reading strategies in reading academic text can be varied based on a lot of factors, such as gender. The respondents are students of the 5th semester of the English Department at one private university in Yogyakarta. The data was collected through a questionnaire from a total of 186 respondents with a ratio 1: 3 between groups or consisting of 52 male students and 134 female students. This study aimed to investigate the reading strategies most commonly used by students of the English Language Education Department, the choice of reading strategies based on gender, and the differences between the strategies used by male and female students. The result revealed that the most commonly used reading strategies by the students were Problem Solving Strategy (M=3.9881) and is included in the category "often". The results also showed that both male and female students chose Problem Solving Strategy as the strategy they most often used when reading academic texts (M male=3.9062 and M female=4.0199), which is included in the category "often". Although the results show that both groups use the same strategy, H1 was accepted because it is proven that there is difference between male and female students in the use of reading strategies in reading academic texts.