Metacognitive Strategy Awareness and Reading Comprehension

This paper reports on a study investigating the relationship between metacognitive strategy awareness in reading and reading ability in L1 and L2. Forty Malaysian secondary school students responded to a reading metacognitive awareness questionnaire. They also completed four sets of reading comprehension tests to determine their reading competence in L1 and L2. Results indicate that reading metacognitive strategy awareness significantly contributes to reading ability for both L1 and L2. This suggests that students are aware of what constitutes efficient reading, and the higher their knowledge of efficient reading, the better their reading ability. The paper concludes with a discussion on the pedagogical implications of these results. Introduction Metacognitive knowledge refers to “knowledge about knowledge” (Alexander, Schallert and Hare 1991: 328) or thinking about thinking. It is an important reading skill (Anderson 1999) as it helps readers verify their reading strategies so that the necessary adjustments can be made if meaning is not obtained. This is referred to as comprehension monitoring. Metacognitive knowledge can be “acquired formally and informally, deliberately or incidentally “ and “learners can become conscious of and articulate what they know” (Wenden 1998: 516). For this reason, many of the studies conducted on metacognitive awareness have relied on the use of interviews or questionnaires which lead readers to reflect on their knowledge about learning. Devine (1988) found that readers’ theoretical orientation towards reading influenced their reading behaviour in that language. In her study, two low/intermediate L2 language proficiency readers seemed to use completely contrasting strategies when reading in L2. One of the readers, who had a Ph. D. and was identified as the more skilled reader, was not able to transfer his higher level reading skills when reading in L2. Low L2 language proficiency seemed to have “short circuited” his reading processes causing him to revert to lower level reading strategies. In contrast, the second reader, who was a housewife and a less skilled L1 reader, was able to transfer her higher level reading strategies when reading in L2. Such a difference in the readers’ behaviour, despite sharing a similar language proficiency and having different L1 reading abilities, seemed to be due to their metacognitive awareness of reading. The readers’ metacognitive awareness of reading was assessed through an oral interview conducted to investigate their general views about reading. The reader who, despite being a more skilled L1 reader, could not transfer his higher level reading strategies when reading in the L2 seemed to be a sound-centred reader. He therefore employed lower level reading strategies. In contrast, the second reader, in spite of being less skilled in L1 reading compared to the first reader, was meaningcentred in both languages. She therefore tended to transfer her top-down reading strategies when reading in the L2. Readers’ metacognitive awareness or theoretical orientation towards reading seemed to have influenced the reading behaviour of these readers rather than L2 language proficiency or L1 reading ability. Carrell (1989) carried out a study to investigate the relationship between metacognitive awareness and reading comprehension in L1 and L2. The study involved students from two language backgrounds — Spanish L1 and English L1 university students. The Spanish L1 students were learning ESL while the English students were learning Spanish as a foreign language. To measure the students’ reading ability in L1 and L2, they answered two sets of multiple choice reading comprehension questions for each language. Then they completed a metacognitive questionnaire about reading in both languages. The metacognitive questionnaire comprised four sections: self-confidence, repair strategies, effective reading strategies, and finally, reading difficulties. Results seemed to indicate that for both groups of readers, when reading in L1, top-down strategies were not significantly related to reading ability. Local strategies, however, seemed to negatively correlate to reading ability. This meant that the less local strategies were perceived as effective reading strategies, the more proficient their reading ability. For L2 reading, however, there seemed to be a difference in the performance of the two groups of subjects. For the English native speakers learning Spanish as a foreign language, some of the local strategies positively correlated to reading ability. For the Spanish L1 and ESL students, some global strategies were found to be positively correlated with reading proficiency. Metacognitive awareness seemed to be related to reading ability in the target language. For the less proficient Spanish as a foreign language reader, there seemed to be a more bottom-up orientation to what were perceived as effective and difficultycausing reading strategies. In contrast, for the more proficient ESL readers, a more top-down perception of effective and problematic reading strategies was reported. Schoonen, Hulstijn and Bossers (1998) investigated the relationship of vocabulary and metacognitive knowledge and reading comprehension in both the L1 and L2. The subjects were 416 Dutch students from three grade levels — 6, 8 and 10 — learning ESL in the Netherlands. The subjects first had to complete a metacognitive questionnaire which was divided into four parts — reader self-assessment, reading goals, text characteristics and reading strategies. Then they completed two multiple-choice reading comprehension tests using both narrative and expository texts. The tests were in both Dutch and English for the three grade levels. Finally, they completed the vocabulary knowledge tests for Dutch and English which were also individually prepared for the three levels. Results for L1 reading seemed to show that L1 vocabulary knowledge was a significant contributor to L1 reading comprehension for all the three grade levels. The role of metacognitive knowledge was only significant from grade 8 onwards. Results of the individual components of the metacognitive questionnaire indicated that knowledge of text characteristics and knowledge of reading strategies seemed to be significant contributors to L1 reading comprehension. It was also found that knowledge of text characteristics seemed to improve as the grade levels got higher. When results for L2 reading were analysed, it was also found that L2 vocabulary was a significant predictor of L2 reading comprehension. However, the strength decreased as the grade level increased and at grade 10, it was not an important predictor. Metacognitive knowledge seemed to be a significant factor from grade 8 onwards. Knowledge of text characteristics and knowledge of reading strategies also seemed to be significant predictors of FL reading ability. The findings showed that both vocabulary and metacognitive knowledge seemed to be important contributors to L1 and L2 reading ability. Vocabulary knowledge was an important predictor of reading ability in both the L1 and L2 for all the grade levels. However, the importance of its contribution seemed to lessen as the grade level got higher, starting from grade 8. Metacognitive awareness was also found to be a significant contributor to both L1 and FL reading. However, it only contributed slightly at grade 8 for L1 and L2 reading ability. Its contribution to reading in both languages seemed to be more significant only at grade 10. This meant at grade 8 foreign language vocabulary was a more important predictor than metacognitive awareness, but in grade 10, metacognitive awareness was a more important predictor than vocabulary knowledge, especially in L2. Monteiro (1992) employed Carrells’ (1989) questionnaire to investigate if there is a relationship between metacognitive awareness and reading ability. Similar to Carrell (1989) the results seemed to indicate that, for both reading in the L1 and L2, the more readers disagreed with the local strategies the better they performed in reading. In other words, the less they perceived bottom-up strategies as effective strategies, the higher their reading ability. When different reading abilities were analysed, it was found that for L1, better readers seemed to agree that they needed to keep reading and hope for clarification more than the poor readers. The poor readers, on the other hand, seemed to agree with more local items on reading difficulties compared to the good reader. In L2, there did not seem to be a difference in their perception of global strategies. However, the poor readers tended to be more bottom-up in their perception of effective and difficulty-causing reading strategies compared to the better readers. No significance tests were carried out on the raw data above. Therefore, the reliability and validity of her findings must be treated with caution. Barnett (1988) investigated the effects of metacognitive awareness and strategy use on reading comprehension. The subjects were 278 university students enrolled in a French course. They were required to complete a prior knowledge questionnaire and read an unfamiliar passage. They then wrote a recall composition on the passage. After that, they read another unfamiliar passage and completed a test which assessed their ability in using contextual information. The test required the students to select the most appropriate phrase, sentence or paragraph to continue the passage. The students then completed a questionnaire on their perceived strategy use. Findings seemed to indicate that there was a linear relationship between strategy use and reading comprehension. Students who used better strategies in reading performed better than students who did not use effective strategies. Metacognitive awareness also seemed to correlate with reading ability. Students who claimed to use effective reading strategies seemed to perform better on the reading comprehension tests compared to readers who did not. In other words, the relationships between perceived strategy use, actual strategy use and reading comprehension were positive. Students who claimed they used effective strategies seemed to use better strategies at understanding sentences in context and they also seemed to have a higher reading ability. The results of the L2 metacognitive studies seem to show that there is a positive correlation between metacognitive awareness and reading ability (Carrell 1989, Monteiro 1992 and Barnett 1988). However, this cannot be conclusive because findings from Spoonen et al. (1998) seem to indicate that there is a threshold level that needs to be achieved before metacognitive awareness can play a significant role in reading. More studies need to be conducted to understand the relationship between metacognitive awareness and reading ability in L2. The purpose of this study is to investigate if there is a relationship between metacognitive awareness and reading ability in both the L1 and L2. To achieve this aim, the following null hypotheses were tested. 1. H1 There is a significant correlation between metacognitive awareness and reading ability in L1. 2. H2 Metacognitive awareness will significantly contribute to L1 reading. 3. H3 There is a significant correlation between metacognitive awareness and reading ability in L2. 4. H4 Metacognitive awareness will significantly contribute to L2 reading.