Reading Strategies in French Written Comprehension Among DLP and Non DLP Learners in Kelantan

The Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia has unveiled a program called the Dwi-Language Program. This Dwi-Language Program, or DLP, is implemented in a few schools. Science and Mathematics are the only disciplines taught in English. According to the DLP, the outcomes of the French learners have improved for reading comprehension. This mixed-methods study's purpose was to highlight reading comprehension techniques, particularly the use of PROB, or Problem-Solving Strategies, among DLP and non-DLP students in Kelantan. The respondents in this survey are third-language learners of French. They were in DELF level A1 and ranged in age from 14 to 17. Rafi's Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) (2002) surveys were taken into consideration for this study. This survey will be administered at a few Kelantan schools. 84 respondents from the DLP class and 68 respondents from the non-DLP class made up the sample for this study. They will get a questionnaire made up of 30 questions separated into three categories: Global strategies (GLOB) (13 items), Support strategies (SUP) (9 items), and Problem-Solving strategies (PROB) (8 items).


Background of Study
In academic settings, reading proficiency is valued at the same level as the other four language learning abilities.According to Duke & Bennett-Armistead (2003), the findings said that it is regarded as a crucial input that affects language learners' verbal and writing abilities.Thus, to understand how learners approach reading problems, researcher must investigate the reading strategies individuals employ (Pourhosein & Sabouri, 2016).Researchers must also examine language learners' reading abilities and the connection between their metacognitive reading techniques and their capacity to grasp texts (D'Angelo et al., 2020).By adopting effective metacognitive reading methods as tools when reading in a foreign language, language learners can improve their reading abilities.Researchers need to look at how metacognitive reading techniques might help with the issue of poor reading comprehension.
According to the definition used in this study, reading comprehension is "the act of simultaneously deriving meaning from and building it from written language" (Anderson et al., 1985;D'Angelo et al., 2020;).
Having access to literature in French will also help students read more quickly and effectively overall, thus the benefits of employing either metacognitive or cognitive strategies go beyond just learning French.It would be difficult for most of the population to learn and comprehend French writings if they lived in a nation where French was considered a foreign or third language (D' Angelo et al., 2020).This is since most people in Malaysia do not frequently speak French in daily life.
Malaysia has two basic categories of elementary and secondary schools.These two institutions are referred to as national and national type.While students enrolling in national type schools learned in vernacular languages (Chinese or Tamil), those attending national schools are largely taught all courses in Malay (David et al., 2018).At a private international school, however, English is the language of instruction.Malaysia is therefore a multilingual nation (David et al., 2018).
The Malaysian Education Blueprint 2015-2025 (PPPM) and the integrated Cumulative Grade Point Average (iCGPA) Rubric Learning Outcomes Assessment Guide significantly improved the policy (Ministry of Education Malaysia, 2015).One of the six key characteristics identified in PPPM is language proficiency, which is highlighted.Although the policy also promotes studying a foreign language, the language competency characteristic places a strong emphasis on students' ability to speak English and Bahasa Malaysia.
Communication is one of the talents that students need to learn, according to the iCGPA evaluation system.Using Bahasa Malaysia, English, and a foreign language effectively to converse in various circumstances is included among the communication abilities described below.
To that purpose, the DLP was launched in 2016 by the Malaysian government.To implement "Dasar Memartabatkan Bahasa Malaysia Memperkukuh Bahasa Inggeris," the Dwi Language Program (DLP) is promoted to schools (MBMMBI) (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia, 2014).
Beginning in 2016, the Malaysian Ministry of Education implemented it in elementary and secondary schools.Given the escalating global rivalry, it is crucial to have a solid command of Malay and English as well as fluency in many languages, as stated in the PPPM 2013-2025.
In accordance with this, several schools also provide French as a third language for the learners to pursue.Students typically do a straight translation, either word for word or phrase for phrase, to grasp a text in their third language because English and French contain almost identical terms with occasionally distinct meanings (Isphording & Otten, 2013;Mady, 2017).Students will do this and reach at the most comparable meaning.
The reader will often rely on their own abilities to comprehend a text written in a third or foreign language.According to Moritz & Lysaker (2018), these techniques are known as metacognition or metacomprehension.To study metacognitive strategy awareness and usage, other researchers were also ready to build or employ unique methodologies including questionnaires, think-aloud protocols, interviews, etc (Liu et al., 2014;Sarac & Karakelle, 2012;Schellings, 2011).
It is crucial for language learners to be conscious of how they employ reading methods to help them comprehend reading content.As a result, language learners who lack metacognitive understanding frequently struggle with reading texts and have poor comprehension abilities (Rafi, 2002).Language learners should be aware of reading methods since many of them may not be familiar with them or may not have been exposed to a variety of reading strategies (Alsheikh & Mokhtari, 2011).Reading methods, according to Frid & Friesen (2020); Alsheikh & Mokhtari (2011), aid language learners in understanding texts could advance their language acquisition.
Although the foreign language strategy has been implemented and improved, learners have expressed their anxiety that they would not be able to communicate successfully in the language they have studied (Hall, 2016).There are several likely reasons for this, including their mother tongue's influence, a lack of learning time (Cheun, 2006;Tan et al., 2016), and few everyday opportunities to speak the target language (Jeon, 2005).They have lost interest in learning the language because of these circumstances.

Problem Statement of Learning French Language
Fortunately, Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Sultan Yahya Petra 1 is one of the Kelantan schools that have been chosen to implement this DLP.The DLP's school will have to offer STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) classes in English.French will be taught at Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Sultan Yahya Petra 1 according to the decision made by the principal.It is believed that because French and English are similar (Isphording & Otten, 2013;Mady, 2017), it will be simpler for the pupils to succeed in French as they do in English.
Only a few studies concurred that some reading techniques may be transferred between languages (Carrell, 1991;Afflerbach et al., 2008;Roshidah, 2020).Considering this, the goal of the current study is to identify the methods that learners from DLP and Non DLP classes employ in their written comprehension.
It might be challenging for students to correctly describe how frequently they employed reading methods since they are typically used subconsciously.Therefore, it is probable that these self-reports of strategy use do not really reflect actual strategy use (Alsheikh & Mokhtari, 2011).
The tool used to assess reading strategies is a questionnaire outlining how and when to apply them.Due to the challenges in measuring the actual use of reading strategies, the current study was restricted to the knowledge of how and when to use reading strategies, or the metacognitive knowledge of reading comprehension.The measure used was found to be related to reading comprehension in a cross-sectional investigation when reading fluency, vocabulary, and working memory were considered.

Research Objective
This study's main goal is to investigate the reading comprehension techniques used by French learners in Kelantan secondary schools.Data were gathered for this study using the Survey of Reading by Mokhtari & Sheory (2002).As a result, it demonstrates the general reading methods used by the participants, shows which ones they use most and least, and investigates the key variations between the groups.The following research issues are so addressed by this study: 1.To determine the strategies employed by DLP and Non DLP French learners.

Research Question
According to the research goals, the current study suggests the following research questions: 1.
Which reading strategies are employed by DLP and Non DLP French learners?

Literature Review
Introduction Written comprehension is a crucial component of student success in school and is a very important learning skill (Al-batineh, 2020;Latifah et al., 2018).Written strategies are "deliberate, goal-directed attempts to regulate and change the reader's efforts to decode text, grasp words, and create meanings of text (Afflerbach et al., 2008).Thus, written comprehension describes a process of learning that goes beyond merely memorising information.Like this, reading is characterised as the result of the interplay of several components, such as personal characteristics, learning ability, reading content, background information, and other elements (Rafi, 2002).Reading comprehension needs the ability to connect new information to what is already known.
The degree of divergence between the learner's mother tongue and the target language determines the difficulty of learning a foreign language (Isphording & Otten, 2014).They contend that this linguistic distance, which refers to variations in vocabulary, phonetic inventory, grammars, scripts, etc., is anticipated to have a significant influence on the effectiveness of language acquisition and ultimately raise the cost of investing in human capital.
Prior research demonstrates that balanced bilinguals can communicate in two languages, but less balanced bilinguals would only use their mother tongue for complicated tasks (Sawyer, 2016).This shows how being bilingual requires having a grasp of the underlying linguistic structures, such as sentence structure or meaning (Sawyer, 2016).

Comprehension Strategies
It is important to recognize the differences between written strategy usage in L1 and L2 contexts while discussing written strategies.According to Yoshida (2012), readers who are reading in an L1 environment employ these methods haphazardly and unintentionally, whereas readers who are reading in an L2 setting use them consciously and on purpose.The absence of lexical items, structural difficulties, text complexity, lack of background information, and other reading obstacles have been faced by readers in L2 context as a result (Yoshida, 2012).
The students' abilities to analyse texts, think critically, and deduce meaning from context cues all seem to be restricted.Written comprehension training is frequently dependent on teachergenerated quizzes or textbook material, testing readers' comprehension of a specific text rather than their ability to analyse texts metacognitively.
One of the necessary criteria for passing the DELF/DALF is written comprehension (https://www.france-education-international.fr,n.d.).Given that all the students are multilingual, the researcher is interested in learning which methods are most likely to be adopted (Malay and English).For the textual comprehension, the researcher would employ metacognitive techniques.Given that the term "metacognition" in the concept of "written comprehension" refers to both "metacognitive awareness" (reader's knowledge) and "metacognitive regulation" (when, where, and how the reader uses strategy while reading) (Moritz & Lysaker, 2018).
The findings of Al-batineh (2020) suggest that researchers should concentrate on the reading skills of language learners and determine the relationship between metacognitive reading methods and text comprehension.The employment of these metacognitive writing procedures, he continued, may be able to resolve the issue of poor written comprehension, which is a major barrier to learning and teaching foreign languages.To comprehend the learners' reading difficulties, it is essential to look at their metacognitive understanding of reading strategies.Therefore, better understanding may result from increased metacognitive awareness.In addition, the learners' textual comprehension can be enhanced by analysing their metacognitive awareness (Moritz & Lysaker, 2018).
Written comprehension metacognition tools can aid in differentiating between proficient and incompetent students.These techniques allow qualified and incompetent learners to be distinguished based on how well they can comprehend a text.The students would use their prior knowledge before extracting accurate interpretations from the text (Rafi, 2002).
Competent readers are therefore aware of the material they are reading, comprehend why they are reading it, and have strategies for overcoming obstacles and determining their level of understanding.Ineffective readers have few effective metacognitive methods.They place greater emphasis on reading as a means of decoding than on its role in informational communication.Naturally, each metacognition component interacts with the others to facilitate understanding and encourage learners to apply their reading skills.

The Online Survey of Reading Strategies (OSORS)
Many scholars have categorized and identified written techniques since they are so important.Metacognitive reading techniques are divided into the following categories by researchers (Rafi, 2002): 1. Global Strategies (GLOB) are methods that readers employ to understand the material, such as previewing the text, reading with an objective in mind, and utilizing context clues.2. Problem Solving strategies (PROB) are deliberate, well-controlled strategies that readers adopt to their own advantage when comprehension issues arise when reading texts.For instance, rereading the material, figuring out the meaning of terms learners do not know, and changing how quickly they read.3. Support strategies (SUP) fundamental aids that learners may use to grasp the book include taking notes, consulting a dictionary, and circling or highlighting textual content.
These three categories make up the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), which was created by Rafi (2002) and measures the metacognitive reading strategies of L2 learners.The knowledge gained from OSORS would be useful to students and teachers.Students will be aware of their reading techniques, and teachers will recognize students' reading techniques.

Research Design
This study uses a mixed method approach to examine the effects of English on the learning processes for French written comprehension.When doing quantitative research, closedended questions and a Likert scale are used to try to quantify the frequency and percentage of data collected from the questionnaire.This study's objective was to investigate any connections between the various writing techniques.According to (find source), correlation analysis demonstrates a connection between two variables.Instead of changing the variables, correlation analysis looks at the interactions and linkages that already exist.Additionally, it says that there is a link between the two studied variables.The main objective of correlation coefficient research is to use correlation coefficients to determine how much variation in one component correlates to variation in one or more other elements.Because reading techniques can be measured using statistical data, it is believed that using this strategy is both extremely suitable and successful.
Prior to getting the questionnaire, the students were given two months to perform reading comprehension exercises for French using English as the language of instruction for the DLP class and Malay for the other.The French instructor would have to provide this questionnaire to these students during this timeframe to assess the success of employing L2 (English) while instructing reading comprehension in French.Taking into mind that some of the specific tactics used by bilingual or multilingual learners are not considered by this instrument.

Respondents
Sampling is a research technique that enables researchers to learn about a population from a sample of its members (Taherdoost, 2017).152 learners from Kelantan schools that take French as a second language in the classroom participated in this study.84 3: Total respondents from each school participated in the survey Figure 3 shows the total number of respondents who participated in this study.They were aged between 14 until 17-year-old and were in Level A1.
Additionally, the Movement Control Order (MCO) put in place in Malaysia to combat the spread of Covid-19 has made it hard for researchers to attend schools and distribute surveys (covid-19.moh.gov.my, n.d.;LEE Noah & DAVID Nisha, 2020;Soalan Lazim Mengenai Perintah Kawalan Pergerakan -Sinar Harian, 2020;www.mohr.gov.my, 2020).The poll was thus made available online by using Google Forms.
The respondents had finished the requisite number of study hours for the A1 French test, as established by France Education International, at the time of the research (FEI) (https://www.france-education-international.fr/diplome/delf-junior-scolaire?langue=fr, n.d.; https://www.france-education-international.fr,n.d.).Since the Secondary School Standard Curriculum was adopted, the time for learning French has been set at 2 hours for a period of one week for each level that takes it (KSSM).None of these respondents had any prior knowledge of French outside the instruction they received while attending institutions that were specifically designed to carry out the acquisition of French as a third language.

Research Instrument
The research instruments are divided into 2 sections: Respondent's Background and OSORS

Respondent's background
There are 3 items in this section that pertain to the respondents' personal information.The following are the items: a.
Agree of participation b.
School c.

French level 2. OSORS
The frequency distribution on a scale of 1 to 5 (Likert scale), with 1 denoting "Never" and 5 denoting "Very Often," is examined in this OSORS study subject.Three levels-high, medium, and low-are added to the computed distribution of mean values.The range of the mean scores received was 1.00 to 10.00.Three parts of this range of maximum and minimum values have been created for analysis.On the low frequency scale, the findings varied from 1.00 to 3.33, on the medium frequency scale from 3.34 to 6.66, and on the high frequency scale from 6.67 to 10.00.

Procedure of Data Collection
As mentioned before, the researcher employed a questionnaire to determine the methods used by the respondents while they are doing French text written comprehension.The initial part of the survey asks about the students' backgrounds before moving on to OSORS.
Learners must first complete the background part to ascertain their proficiency in both English and French.French language learners at the A1 level were selected to participate in this study as level A1 is the most elementary.
All respondents then received a message through WhatsApp with an explanation.Before giving each French teacher a text to send to their students using "WhatsApp," the researcher provided them each an explanation.To improve student's comprehension, researcher will occasionally add "voice notes" that explain concepts.If students had any trouble filling out the questionnaire, the researcher even supplied a phone number.
The SPSS version 26 was used to determine frequency, percentage, and mean deviation from the data from the questions.

Procedure of Data Analysis
Since this is a quantitative study, the data collected from the respondents to the survey will be analysed using SPSS version 26.
The variables' means, standard deviations, and frequencies were calculated using descriptive statistics.According to Mokhtari and Sheorey (2002), the range was divided into three levels (high, moderate, and low), based on the average results on a 5-point Likert scale.Three categories of scores were created: high (mean of 3.5 or higher), moderate (means of 2.5 to 3.4), and low (means of 2.5 to 3.4).Figure 6 shows the mean for the last part of the OSORS questionnaire.For this section, there are 9 questions to be answered.8 displays the overall results for every component for schools that are Non DLP. Figure 8 makes it very evident that SMK Hamzah 2 and SMK Machang both have outcomes that are distinct for each area.Both schools employ all three reading comprehension techniques whereas respondents at SMK Sultan Yahya Petra 2 preferred the PROB approach over GLOB and SUP.From Figure 7 and 8, the findings showed that there is no significant difference between DLP and Non DLP schools.From the results obtained, SMK Machang used all three strategies which are GLOB, PROB and SUP strategies.Likewise with SMK Hamzah 2, although these two schools are not schools that use English as an intermediate language for science and mathematics subjects.

SMK SULTAN
This outcome demonstrates that the respondents understands when to apply certain strategies to address the issues in written comprehension.

Conclusion
This study's main goal is to investigate the reading comprehension techniques used 6 selected schools in Kelantan.As conclusion, it demonstrates the general reading methods used by the learners are all the three strategies mentioned in OSORS.All GLOB, PROB and SUP strategies were used by these learners accordingly.There is no significant difference between these schools, either the school is DLP or Non DLP.According to the literature study, it has been demonstrated that learners who are proficient in English are more likely to be proficient in French, the third language.Additionally, learners could compare English and French effortlessly because of their similarities.With a study like this, it facilitates French teachers to use English as a medium of instruction, in addition to improving the quality of learning for French students in Kelantan.

Figure 6 :
Figure 6: The responses for the SUP in OSORS The DLPs' results for each section in OSORS The total scores for each component for DLP schools are shown in figure7.Figure7makes it quite evident that SMK Sultan Yahya Petra 1 makes extensive use of PROB and SUP methods.For SMS Gua Musang, on the other hand, the PROB method is used by most respondents.The three approaches recommended in OSORS were employed by SMS Machang's respondents to handle the written comprehension issue.The Non DLPs' results for each section in OSORS Meanwhile, Figure The responses for the GLOB in OSORSThe mean for each question in the GLOB section is shown in figure4.18 questions are in the Glob section.Before moving on to the PROB phase of OSORS, each student must respond to each question.