A Study of Investigation of English Reading Comprehension of Undergraduate Students Using Online Newspaper

Abstract

To encourage students’ attention in reading, news articles can be used as supplementary materials in addition to textbooks. This research was conducted to investigate of English Reading comprehension of undergraduate students using online newspaper. The study was conducted with 27 first year students from the faculty of Education major in Teaching English. All of them were taking an English skills development course in the second semester at Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University, Thailand. The data was collected through a paper’s questionnaire distributed to the participants. The data was analyzed to find the means and standard deviations (SD). A Likert scale was used to score and interpret the data. The findings showed that the participants strongly agreed that reading news article can improve their vocabulary. They also agreed that news articles were an appropriate material in teaching reading in terms of improving reading comprehension skill, providing interesting and up-to-date content, providing authentic resources, providing for a deeper understanding about the lifestyles and cultures of native English-speaking countries, and helping to promote good relationships with their English teacher.