Effects of a combined - metacognitive strategy training on university EFL students' comprehension and retention of academic reading texts

Abstract

The question investigated in the present study was whether instructing university students with the combined metacognitive strategies of self-questioning (SQ) and prediction would improve reading comprehension and recall of academic texts. SQ basically means asking questions to oneself while reading and prediction is making inferences about the next piece of information in the text. Studies done on metacognitive strategy training in students' native language give promising results in improving students' reading, but the infrequent use of strategies by adults shows that strategies do not automatically develop. This suggests that students must be instructed on the benefits of the metacognitive strategies and how to use them (Pressley and Harris, 1990). As far as reading in a second language is concerned, there are few studies which have investigated metacognitive strategy training. In particular, the number of studies done on combined strategies is rather low. Furthermore, the results are contradictory (O'Malley and Chamot, 1990). Two hypotheses were tested in the study. The first hypothesis stated that giving EFL university students a combined metacognitive strategy training of SQ and prediction would help them to comprehend academic texts better. The second hypothesis stated that these strategies would also help these students to recall the subject matter better. An intact group design was used in the study. There were two groups: one experimental and one control group. The experimental group had four 50-minute training sessions on SQ and prediction, but the control continued their regular reading classes. A total of 28 EFL university students, 17 in the experimental group and 11 in the control group, participated in the study. Data analyses showed that after the training there was no significant improvement in the reading comprehension scores of the experimental group at the level p<.05. Thus, the first hypothesis was rejected. The analyses for recall showed that there was a significant improvement in the experimental group's recall scores after the training at the level p <.05. Thus, the second hypothesis was accepted. Two major explanations for this unexpected finding of improvement in recall but not in comprehension are offered. First, students may not have asked higher-order (SQ) questions during testing but rather asked lower-order questions which may have led to increased verbatim recall but not increased inferential comprehension (Rickards and Di Vesta, 1974). Another plausible explanation is that the time of the strategy training may have been too short to show an increase in comprehension (Dewitz, Carr, and Patberg, 1987).