A case study of six EFL freshman readers : overview of metacognitive ability in reading

Abstract

The present study was designed to investigate metacognitive abilities of six individual readers, particularly their level of awareness about how they read, the strategies they used to comprehend a text, and how their awareness and actual strategy use were reflected in their comprehension. The participants were EFL freshman students at an English-medium university in Turkey. Three sets of verbal data were collected from the participants through the use of mentalistic research methods — think-aloud protocols, retrospective reports, and self-report interviews. Think-aloud protocols and retrospective reports provided data on actual strategy use, and self- report interviews produced information about the readers* metacognitive awareness of their own reading processes and strategies. The use of these different sets of data provided a better understanding of the processes contributing to the readers* comprehension of a text which was assessed through recall protocols. Good comprehenders were found to have a high level of awareness and control of their reading processes. The present results suggest that it was primarily effective and constant use of comprehension monitoring and self-assessment strategies which distinguished good readers from the others. These findings lead to the conclusion that metacognitive awareness and strategy use has the potential to influence comprehension outcomes in a positive manner.