Metacognitive Strategies and Reading Comprehension

Abstract

The aim of this research is to study the effectiveness of the use of metacognitive strategies in reading, as well as their impact on reading comprehension. The participants involved in the study are 20 university students of EFL attending the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić. Research data was collected through the implementation of a pre-test and a post-test. According to the results of the reading comprehension pre-test, students were divided into experimental and control groups, experimental groups being exposed to metacognitive reading strategies instruction for the duration of both semesters of one academic year; this places our research into a longitudinal type of research. Further detailed research data was collected by means of a quantitative analysis of a corpus of assessment tools including a reading comprehension test, a metacognitive strategy questionnaire for students, and journals written by students; journal assessment was realized through the utilization of rubrics. The results of this research imply that our study on the use of metacognitive strategies in the reading skill could serve as an example for future studies in this field, especially because metacognitive strategies are applicable to the remaining three language learning s kills, namely, listening, speaking and writing skills.