An examination of the reader´s difficulties in comprehension may reveal that certain linguistic and discourse features are more liable to misunderstandings. The comprehension problems that multiword lexical units may give rise to is a common experience shared not only by readers of technical writings but also by lexicographers, lexicologists, terminologists and technical translators. Among those were difficulty with heavy noun phrase subjects and objects, syntactic markers of cohesion, and the role of non-technical vocabulary in technical texts. Although the reading passages untilized in the studies reflected different disciplines and different rhetorical approaches, students across disciplines were found to have similar problems. For comparison purposes the fourth study also elicited responses from native English speakers. The studies investigated a bio-chemistry student's experience reading a survey article on genetics, two biology students' experiences reading textbook material on genetics, an economics-international relations student's experience reading an analysis of the voting process, and three South East Asian history students' experiences reading the introduction to a basic history text.

This paper focuses on the Israeli students' handling of specialized English discourse and discusses findings from four complementary studies conducted by a small group of investigators. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have investigated the reading of English texts in the subject disciplines from the viewpoints of the native-English-speaking professor in the particular field, the teacher of English as a foreign language, and the advanced learner of English who is a student in the particular field.

Comprension lectora nivel e santillana