Student Insights: Challenges in Acquiring Critical Academic Reading Skills

Acquiring critical academic reading skills is crucial for university students, as the skills enable them to evaluate texts effectively. Despite exposure through university courses, many students struggle to attain these skills. This study aimed to identify the necessary academic reading skills deemed challenging by the students and the underlying reasons for these difficulties. A mixed-methods approach was employed, using a questionnaire with a Likert scale ranging from “strongly confident†to “not at all confident†, and open-ended questions, were conducted on 229 respondents at one public university in Malaysia. Quantitative data was analysed descriptively, while content analysis was employed to categorize the reasons. The results revealed that a small percentage of the respondents felt completely confident with all the skills, while some partially mastered the skills and others doubted their skills. The most challenging skills were making inferences, analysing context, detecting assumptions, and evaluating arguments. The reasons for these challenges included linguistic factors, such as limited vocabulary and insufficient language proficiency, and non-linguistic factors, like confusion, lack of confidence, and inability to comprehend text. The findings indicate that critical thinking should be taught separately to help students focus on these specific skills, emphasizing the importance of targeted strategies to overcome these issues.