Olena Bychkovska

Report on Prevailing Types of Reading

 Among the Students of Faculty of Social Sceinces and Social Technologies 

            On the 19^th of March, a survey was conducted among 15 master students of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Social Technologies of National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” during their English class. The purpose of this survey was to determine the prevalent types of reading among the students according to their previous study years.

       The survey was conducted by means of a questionnaire that was given to students. It consisted of 5 closed-ended questions with 4 possible answers each. The questionnaire was not divided into parts. Each question asked about the prevalent type of reading during one of the 5 years of study.

     Barchart 1. Types of Readings by the Students of Faculty of Social Sciences and Social Technologies According to the Study Year depicts the types of reading that students have according to their study year in the National University of ‘Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”. The answers of the students are shown on the horizontal axes and the maximum number of answers is 15. On the vertical, the study years are depicted. The first four years correspond to the bachelor study program and the fifth to the master study program. Each bar is colored according to the type of reading that was predominantly conducted by students. These types of the readings include reading: for own speciality, for other specialities, for pleasure and the reading of news. Therefore, there can be seen five sets of bars, each of which presents the predominant type of readings for each study year.

As it can be seen from this barchart the prevalent type of reading years through all of the years is the reading for own speciality. This type of reading has the highest rate, which is 9, at the second and fourth year of studying and during the first and third year it is equals 6. Moreover, the rate never drops under 6 answers. As it is shown on the graph the rate or reading for own speciality is also high during the fifth year of studies. Also, in the first year it is equal to the rate of the reading for other specialities; however, during the next years the rate of the reading for other specialities decreases sharply and is especially low during the third and fourth years of studying. The rate of the reading for pleasure stays comparably high through all of the study years and it equals 3 at all the years except the second when it declines to 2. As shown on the barchart, in the fifth year the rate of this type of reading is equal to reading the news. In fact, there was a very rapid rise in the rate of reading the news among these students, which at the first year was 0 and reached 3 in the fifth year. During the second and fourth year the rate of reading the new among students is still low; however, the overall tendency of an increase can be seen. Yet, such rate is the lowest comparably to other types of readings.

The described tendencies can be deeper explained and better understood if we consider the particularities of the study process in this specific university in general and of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Social Technologies and its students in particular. Also, valuable conclusions from the discovered patterns can be suggested. Off course, the sample of 15 students from one faculty is not enough for generalizing the made conclusions on all the students of National University of ‘Kyiv-Mohyla Academy”. Nevertheless, some general tendencies can be explored. The rate of the reading for own speciality is high through all of the study years, because those are the subject both the professors and student pay the most attention to and the tasks settled during those courses demand a lot of readings for each seminar. On the other hand, students lo have to master various subjects from other specialities especially during the first year; consequently, the reading for other specialities takes a lot of time during this year. Yet, the rate of reading for other specialities falls during further years which can be perceived as a sigh that the students are not interested in other subjects and want to focus on own specialization. On the contrary, it also can signal of the university providing not interesting subjects or subjects that do not require a lot of readings and overall good completion of tasks. Moreover, in the third and fourth years student usually write term and thesis papers; therefore, their readings on own speciality have to increase regardless of their willingness to read or not to read on the given topics. In addition, from the tendency that the rate of reading for pleasure stays permanent it can be suggested that the students of this faculty like reading and find time for it notwithstanding the necessity to read for seminars and paper works. Nevertheless, even though the students like to read, the rate of reading for pleasure never escalates before the given points, which is probably due to the large study load and responsibility of students to do the pleasure reading after the readings for studying. Besides, the rise of news reading may be considered as an influence of the university’s community, where significant number of people read news. Moreover, the Political Science students news reading is especially needed in order to complete the assignment in their major, such as a term paper in the year 3 year, where a sudden increase of news reading can be seen. The fact that the rate of the news reading is equal to the pleasure reading on the fifth may be a sigh that for some people news reading has become a reading for pleasure