Vocational Students’ Perceptions of Integrated Critical Reading Strategies in Business English Texts

Rika Wahyuni Tambunan (Akademi Komunitas Negeri Putra Sang Fajar Blitar)
Sri Hardiningsih (Politeknik Negeri Semarang)
Betharia br Sembiring Pandia (STBA Persahabatan Internasional Asia (STBA-PIA) Medan)

International Journal of Educational Narratives
Vol. 4 No. 5 (2026)

Background: Vocational EFL students often understand explicit information in workplace texts but struggle to infer implicit meanings, evaluate arguments, and distinguish facts from opinions. Limited evidence explains how complementary critical reading strategies function together in vocational Business English and how students perceive them. Purpose: This study investigated how Indonesian vocational Business English students perceived and applied Stop-Paraphrase-Questioning (SPQ), Annotation, and Journaling, and their benefits and challenges in reading workplace business texts. Method: An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design involved 30 second-semester vocational students. Questionnaire data were analyzed using frequencies and percentages; observations and reading tasks showed strategy use; interviews were thematically analyzed to explain quantitative patterns, with findings integrated during interpretation. Results: Journaling was selected most often (23 of 65 responses; 35%), followed by SPQ and Annotation (21 each; 32%). Students associated the strategies with broader perspectives (40%), idea analysis (27%), and key information identification (21%); reflective self-evaluation was least identified (12%). The main challenge was interpreting implicit information (16 of 30 students; 53%), followed by limited background knowledge (23%) and vocabulary (13%). Students reported stronger focus on main ideas and willingness to analyze texts, but argument evaluation, fact–opinion distinction, and text-based opinions remained limited. Conclusion: Students perceived the strategies as supporting focused engagement with workplace Business English texts, particularly comprehension monitoring and key information identification. The findings indicate perceived instructional value, not causal improvement or increased motivation. Its originality lies in examining SPQ, Annotation, and Journaling as complementary stages of comprehension monitoring, textual analysis, and metacognitive reflection. Explicit modeling and scaffolding remain necessary to strengthen inferential reasoning and evaluative judgment.