Abstract

Reading has always been an important skill for university students in order for them to gain access to knowledge in the academic books. Despite this, many students who view reading in English as important do not actually engage themselves in English reading activities outside class hours. Reading for pleasure allows learners to acquire certain language skills. Therefore, an experimental study using reading for pleasure was conducted. The experimental group was exposed to reading for pleasure for 5 weeks, while the other group was not. However, the control group showed better improvement of comprehension skills in the post test. Whereas, the pre-test scores results were nearly the same. The reasons for this are explained in the discussion that follows. From questionnaires distributed, a substantial number of subjects (79%) said that reading for pleasure would help them to understand the text better and they would pursue reading for pleasure. It is hoped that this small-scale study would highlight the effect of reading for pleasure in improving the students’ reading comprehension skills. Future researchers should cover an experimental study which is of longer duration. A period of six months is suggested.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.