One student in the low proficiency group thought differently. Though she remarked
that practicing awareness of success and failure was a good way to assess herself, she did not
think it would be necessary for her to develop such an awareness: “I think it’s good as it
makes me know how much I can do, but I don’t see the reason why I should apply it in my
future reading” (Student # L4). Thus, it can be concluded that both the high and low
proficiency students regarded the awareness of successes and failures as contributing certain
advantages to their reading. Both groups reported that the ability to identify the sources of
success and failure enabled them to realize their strengths and weaknesses, as well as how to
improve their reading skills. When asked, in the Group Interview, to compare ALI with their
reading classes in the past, high proficiency students felt that ALI was different from their
previous reading practice in that it helped them learn more vocabulary and, apart from
reading skills practice, they gained more knowledge from the reading passages as two
students observed during the group interview:
This reading instruction helps me learn more new words and I gain general
knowledge that is beyond practicing reading like reading course that I’ve previously
taken. (Student #H 1)
It’s different from my reading courses in the past. Most of them focused on finding
main idea and that was it. I only knew that when it came to reading, all we had to do
was finding a main idea. I didn’t know more than that. In this course, I learnt that we
read, and we talked about it; we wrote about it.” (Student #H3)
A low proficiency student stated that he had learnt more than reading. He was able to
attain some syntactic knowledge and other higher-order skills: “I’ve learnt to analyze
sentence structures and I have to try to give opinions about the passages” (Student #L 4).