The Reading Strategies Used by Iranian ESP Students to Comprehend Authentic Expository Texts in English

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the reading strategies of Iranian ESP students when they read authentic expository texts in English. To this end, 81 male/female university sophomore students studying environmental health, occupational health and safety, and midwifery at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences participated in the study. The Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002) was used in this study. This Survey classifies reading strategies into three categories: global, problem solving, and support strategies. The findings demonstrated that the participants are moderately aware of reading strategies and the mostfrequently used strategies were support strategies, followed by global strategies, and then problem solving strategies. The Iranian ESP students used the reading strategies differently according to their academic majors.