Bottom-up vs Top-down Model: The Perception of Reading Strategies among Thai University Students Prathomwat Suraprajit Faculty of Management Sciences, Kasetsart University, Thailand Abstract—Reading strategies have been declared as a vital role in reading comprehension among the students whose English is their second or foreign language. The use of reading strategies would help the learners to deeper understand the text so that they could achieve their tasks. The present study then investigates the use of reading strategies by focusing on the bottom-up and top-down models for both academic and business texts among Thai students in tertiary level. Two hundred-seventy non-simple random undergraduate students participated in this study. The forty-five-item questionnaire was delivered to the participants. The findings were that top-down reading strategies were used the most for both academic and business reading, whereas bottom-up reading strategies were reported the least on both kinds of text. The results suggest that larger numbers of participants, correction between the proficiency and the use of strategies, in-depth interview, and strategies used between low and high proficient readers should be examined. Index Terms—top-down model, bottom-up model, academic text, business text I. INTRODUCTION English plays a vital role for all society around this planet. Not only speaking, writing or listening, but reading is also a very necessary for those who prefer to communicate effectively. Chawwang (2008) stated that reading is the most important skill because it is the useful tool for acquiring knowledge. Used in both studying and living life, English is a lifelong skill for many people (Kucukoglu, 2013). Then, without ability to read well, opportunities for personal fulfilment and job success inevitably will be lost (Anderson et al., 1985). If students expect to get the deepest understanding of what they read, they should have the techniques or strategies for reading. The ability to read proficiently is significantly related to how much a person can achieve in his or her personal and professional life (Block & Israel, 2005). Reading can also serve many purposes. Firstly, it makes the reader relax. Lots of people prefer to read their favorite books in their spare time. Secondly, reading is crucial for business purposes. The business people face a ton of emails in their daily work. The reading skill then supports a lot on this interaction. Lastly, the readers may read for knowledge. For example, the students are usually required to read the journals or academic books in all courses they registered. The stated reading purposes are some reasons that present how important the reading skill is. In Thailand, reading is also very important for Thai people, especially English reading. That is because English is a medium language for Thai people for cooperating with the neighbors in AEC (Asean Economics Community) countries and other foreign countries which use English for communicating in various purposes. However, reading is still considered a difficult task for most of Thai people. According to PISA (2015), the report from the program for international student assessment showed that Thailand shared of low achievers in reading below the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average which is about 20% of students in OECD countries. The reports from EF EPI (2017) also indicated that English proficiency of Thais is very low and below the average. The difficulties in reading among Thais are also found in many previous studies. Hayikaleng, Nair & Krishnasamy (2016) also comment that Thai students usually face difficulty when they read the academic books that is consistent with the study of Kasemsap & Lee (2015) who also stated that Thai students are weak in English reading comprehension. Then, there are some scholars who searched on the reasons why reading is a difficult task among Thai people. Chawwang (2008) investigated the English problems among Thai students. The results showed that the problems cover three areas including sentence structure, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Another idea comes from Pangsapa (2012) who did a research on the English reading problems among Thai editorial staff. Her findings revealed that four main reading problems includes not understanding technical words meaning, not knowing the word meaning, facing with complex and very long sentences with many dependent clauses or paragraphs, and unfamiliar words. Therefore, the reading strategies are important and useful for solving these reading problems or difficulties. Garner (1987) stated that reading strategies are as generally deliberate, playful activities undertaken by active learners, many times to remedy perceived cognitive failure. According to Brown (2007a), reading strategies could be defined as the specific methods of approaching a problem or task, modes of operation for achieving a particular ends, planned designs ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 454-460, May 2019 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1003.07 © 2019 ACADEMY PUBLICATION