This research paper examines a range of essential reading strategies used by English as a Second Language (ESL) students, focusing on how these strategies support comprehension, engagement, and overall language development. The study highlights seven key strategies: skimming, scanning, reading for gist, making inferences, predicting, asking questions while reading, and identifying main ideas along with supporting sentences. Each of these strategies plays a distinct yet interconnected role in helping learners construct meaning from texts, monitor their understanding, and read with greater purpose and efficiency. Skimming and scanning enable learners to approach texts strategically by quickly locating general or specific information, which is particularly beneficial in academic and real-world contexts where time and clarity are essential. Reading for gist helps students grasp overarching ideas, while inference and prediction encourage deeper cognitive processing by requiring students to connect textual clues with prior knowledge. Asking questions during reading enhances metacognitive awareness and keeps learners actively engaged, fostering a habit of self-monitoring and clarification. Finally, identifying main ideas and supporting sentences strengthens learners’ ability to organize information, summarize effectively, and distinguish between essential and non-essential details. The paper emphasizes that these strategies are not only helpful but highly important in ESL classrooms. When integrated into instruction, they empower students to become independent, confident readers capable of approaching complex texts with skill and flexibility. This research is qualitative based research. Students and language instructors are interviewed in this research paper. Students were asked which reading strategy helped them the most in ESL classes. While language instructors were asked how these strategies were productive in their point of view. The findings underscore the broader importance of reading as a foundation for language acquisition: strong reading skills contribute to vocabulary growth, improved writing abilities, and greater overall academic success. By equipping ESL learners with diverse and purposeful reading strategies, educators can enhance comprehension, promote critical thinking, and support long-term language proficiency.
Keywords: ESL college students, Kuwait, effective reading strategies, inference, skimming
