Abstract : Reading comprehension is a crucial skill for both attaining knowledge and enhancing learners ́ academic and personal growth. Yet, the process of reading and understanding academic and disciplinary texts in a Foreign Language comprises an in- depth knowledge of the language and the attainment of many complex skills – to understand main ideas, to make inferences, to develop a critical stance. Usually, students ́ reading comprehension skills are tested in a two or three- hours exam with source texts unknown to them and instructions which need to be processed and solved during that time limit. Nevertheless, students at the BAs of Distance Education at UNICEN do not have the same prior knowledge of the English language when they start the course of reading comprehension or have not even dealt with academic and/ or scientific textsin their mother tongue in previous levels of education. Moreover, students do not generally develop a solid knowledge of the English language after the eight- month reading instruction course. Thus, a more comprehensive procedure was implemented in the last two examination boards – i.e. source texts provided in advance. To assess the repercussions of such procedure, a questionnaire was designed and completed by 50 out of the 62 students that sat for the exam in the last examination boards. The results were analyzed quantitively and qualitatively, though no statistical method was applied this time. Even though the sample is not as representative as expected, the preliminary results ratified that students ́ had diverse prior experiences with the English language and a few had had exposure to academic and scientific texts in previous levels of education. As regards the exams per se, the results also show an increase in students ́ confidence, exam performance and students ́ commitment to the challenging instructions proposed which could lead to the introduction of permanent changes in the exams of distance education if these results sustain in future examination boards.

Keyword :Academic texts, Assessment, Distance Education, English as a Foreign Language, Reading Comprehension.