Exploring metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and reading comprehension performance of intermediate and advanced learners of English as a second language

Abstract

The present research report provides information about a quantitative study that intended to explore possible relationships between the students’ perception of their metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and their performance in a reading comprehension test. The variables were the scores that intermediate and advanced university students of English as a second/foreign language got in a metacognitive awareness of reading questionnaire and in an English reading comprehension test. The participants were 10 intermediate and 10 advanced students taking a four-year academic programme in English language and literature. The intermediate students were in the second year of the programme whereas advanced students were in their fourth -and final- year of studies. The instruments applied to collect the data were taken online by the participants, who volunteered to take the tests. The data collected were processed in terms of descriptive statistics, such as means, and standard deviation. Then, correlation coefficients were calculated to identify relationships between the variables. The results of the study were unexpected since the intermediate group of students got better results that the advanced student group in the questionnaire and in the reading test. Besides, no relationship between the perceived metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and the reading comprehension performance was identified in any of the two groups of participants. Thus, possible explanations are offered for the fact that the better results of the questionnaire and the reading test were obtained by the intermediate group and for the fact that no relationships were identified between the students’ perceived metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and their performance in the reading comprehension test. Nevertheless, both groups of students perceived the use of different subscales or factors of metacognitive strategies, which is important for the development of their reading comprehension skill and for becoming more autonomous language learners.