Reading Comprehension and Metacognitive Strategies in First Year Engineering University Students in Pakistan

Abstract

The paper investigates the use of metacognitive strategies by first year engineering students at the time of classroom practice on reading text. The study was conducted in four engineering departments of a university in Pakistan. Data was collected through focus group interviews of first year engineering students. The researchers developed interview questions which were validated by two experts at university Malaysia Sarawak. Students were divided into 8 groups and each group had 5 informants. The data was recorded in audio-tape and organized gathered data through NVivo version 8 for interpretation of the results. The most important themes were generated through data analysis including thinking through images of the texts, selecting the main ideas, selecting the topic sentences, scanning of the texts, summarizing of the texts, and Questioning. The study contributed theoretically by giving the most promising results which showed that more than half of these groups used metacognitive strategies in classroom reading practice while less than half of groups did not use strategies and remained poor in reading comprehension. This study proposed to develop reading comprehension courses and syllabus based on reading strategies for engineering students.

Investigating Metacognitive Reading Strategies to Overcome Barriers in English Reading Comprehension at Kohat University of Science and Technology Kohat ,KP, Pakistan

“…Also, they use analytic strategies such as evaluation, revising background knowledge, reading goals, searching information, strengths and visualize descriptions for better understanding of the text. These findings are consistent with those of MachdalenaVianty(2007) and Channa et al (2018).…”

Levels of Reading Comprehension in Higher Education: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…For example, several studies (Tuncer and Bahadir, 2014;Trakhman et al, 2019;Kazazoglu, 2020) indicate that reading is more efficient with better performance in reading comprehension tests in printed texts compared to the same text in digital and according to Spencer (2006) college students prefer to read in print vs. digital texts. In reading the written text, metacognitive strategies are involved (Amril et al, 2019) but studies (Channa et al, 2018) seem to indicate that students do not use them for reading comprehension, specifically; Korotaeva (2012) finds that only 7% of students use them. Concerning the type of text and difficulties, for Wolfe and Woodwyk (2010), expository texts benefit more from the construction of a situational model of the text than narrative texts, although Feng (2011) finds that expository texts are more difficult to read than narrative texts.…”

The Impact of Metacognitive Reading Strategies on Master Students’ EFL Reading Proficiency and Academic Achievement

“…The outcomes of the present study are similar to the research carried out previously in this field by Genc (2011, p. 654), Aziz et al (2019, p. 138-159) which also informed about high usage of problem solving strategies as well as using reference materials to be the top five strategies students applied. The approach to strategy grouping may vary, but in general the results of this study don't contradict conclusions made by Channa et al (2018) who generated the research data using images of the text, selecting the main ideas, selecting the topic sentences, scanning of the text, summarizing of the text and questioning, e.g. with a different approach to categorizing reading strategies.…”