Eleventh-grade Students’ Use of Metacognitive Reading Strategies in Arabic (L1) and English (L3)

Abstract

Metacognitive strategy awarenessMetacognition refers to an individual's awareness of their cognitive development, mental processes, learning styles, and the capacity to organize, manage and solve problems. Flavell (1979) regards reading as a cognitive enterprise that involves an awareness of a variety of MCRS and skills. Brown et al. (1986) maintain that metacognition is crucial to reading comprehension. In the same vein, Karbala (2011) argues that the context of reading comprises two types of cognition: A reader's knowledge of reading strategies to learn from the text, and the ability an individual has to monitor their actions during the reading process reading. MCRS are described as tools that assist students to understand their abilities and figure out how to learn different skills in the learning environment while dealing with a reading task (Sutiyatno & Sukarno, 2019). MCRS are regarded as conscious, deliberate, and goal-oriented activities or plans that readers employ to decode, understand and construct meanings from written texts (Afflerbach et al., 2008;Manoli & Papadopoulou, 2012). While reading skills are defined as unconscious, automatic, effortless activities (Manoli & Papadopoulou, 2012) used to decode and comprehend texts quickly, efficiently, and fluently, "usually without the reader's awareness of the components or controls involved" (Afflerbach et al., 2008, p.15), MCRS are "in fact problem-solving strategies employed by readers to cope with reading texts" (Al-Mekhlafi, 2018, p. 299).According to Abu-Rabia (2018), metacognitive reading processes include three key stages: planning, monitoring, and evaluating. Each reading phase comprises a number of MCRS that could be employed at a specific point during the global reading comprehension process. These strategies comprise setting an objective to reading, activating background knowledge, making predictions, skimming, scanning, repairing, guessing meaning, visualizing, checking, revising, altering reading speed, deconstructing the structure of the text, summarizing, evaluating, and self-questioning in the postreading phase to check whether the purpose behind reading is achieved (Carrell et al., 1998). Iwai (2011) maintains that metacognition plays a key role in reading comprehension as it is linked to linguistic, cognitive, and social skills development, and that metacognitive strategy awareness can sharpen students' mental processes and make them strategic thinkers who can deal with difficult tasks in a scientific way. Similarly, Auerbach & Paxton (1997) assert that metacognitive strategies can be effectively activated only when learners read a certain text with a particular purpose in mind. According to Karbalaei (2011, p.7), to do a reading comprehension task successfully, readers must use their metacognitive knowledge to trigger "conscious and deliberate strategies." MCRS show readers how to deal with a given reading task, what textual prompts to exploit, how to decode the reading material, and what procedures to follow when failing to get the...

The effect of reading strategy use on online reading comprehension

“…Students from urban areas agreed that digital reading was extremely easy and practical to understand, whereas students from rural areas reported difficulties in online reading. As online reading uses hyperlinks and various hypermedia, the students enjoyed and actively participated in online learning [[ 27 , 79 ]]. In another study [ 75 ], examined the effects of students' attitudes toward online reading on language learning.…”

Metacognition as a Reading Strategy in Incoming University Students

“…The research was born when the deficiency in the reading comprehension of students entering the university was observed, so it was decided to select several instruments that manage to measure the level of comprehension in university students, after selecting four instruments found in the SCOPUS base, the measurement instrument of the author Razkane et al (2023) was selected, which was interpreted with two native specialists from English to Spanish, after reviewing the instrument and being adapted to the Peruvian version, the respective tests were done with 70 students to know the perspectives and statistical data which affirmed three other expert Doctors of the subject from other universities. The instrument, once validated and adapted to the Peruvian version, used the Google form to assemble the online survey, in which the perspectives of incoming students on metacognition as a reading strategy could be measured, which has 19 questions divided into four dimensions.…”

“…Thus, several databases were investigated in order to select a scientific article that could measure the reading strategies of incoming students, and after having selected the article by Razkane et al, (2023) we proceeded to adapt it to the Peruvian version with the help of native translators and then put together the online survey. Where it was programmed to be able to answer only once with institutional mail as personal mail, because the survey would be nationwide with voluntary and anonymous participation, the online survey was shared with known colleagues so that they can disseminate it only in students who recently entered, that is, for students who are in the first academic cycle of a professional career.…”