Teaching master students to read and interpret English academic journal articles

The article deals with the analysis of a strategy that promotes non-English speaking Master students’ ability to read and interpret authentic English-language academic research articles. The authors have got a hypothesis that the effectiveness of teaching can be promoted if Master students read an academic article in its three versions –the first fully adapted version, the second partly adapted version and finally the same authentic scientific paper in full. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used. The theoretical part of the research involved the analysis of modern methodological, psychological and linguistic studies. The experimental part of the research consisted of two stages –ascertaining and formative. In order to conduct a formative experiment, all Master students of the same sample were split into 2 groups. Students who had demonstrated a higher level of receptive skills in the process of ascertaining experiment, became participants of the control group (CG), and students who had shown a lower level of the same skills –participants of the experimental group (EG).The ascertaining stage of the experiment has shown that most of the participants (nearly 75%) have significant difficulties in reading, understanding and interpreting academic journal articles. The hypothesis has been experimentally checked. The results for control and experimental groups, taking part in the formative experiment, prove that the introduced method has significant advantages in both learning scientific vocabulary, understanding authentic non-adapted research paper in English, oral retelling and scientific article interpreting. © 2021JLLS and the Authors -Published by JLLS.Keywords:academic reading;interpretation;vocabulary;language;lexical items