Fostering Metacognitive Strategies In Teaching Reading To EFL University Students

Metacognition is generally defined as"any knowledge and cognition regulation to the ongoing activities". Its essence is the cognition of cognitive activities themselves. It was put forward by American psychologist Flavell in 1970s when he was engaged in the study of metamemory. In the recent year years, more and more importance has been attached to developing and fostering metacognitive awareness in learning strategy. Reading comprehension is one of the important skills and one of the ultimate goals in foreign language learning. Reading is a process of psycholinguistic activity. In this activity, the reader actively combines his or her knowledge or schema with the textual information in the process of planning, recognizing, guessing, inferring, proving, monitoring and evaluating etc. In this active process, strategies involved will affect the process of reading comprehension, and the reader should intentionally regulate and control the reading process and adopt appropriate strategies to solve the problems during it.The purpose of this study was to investigate the metacognitive reading strategies used by Jiangsu Polytechnic University (JPU) first-year engineering students. The three research questions addressed in this study were: (a) What are the metacognitive reading strategies used by university first year engineering students? (b)What are the metacognitive reading strategies used by students with different reading abilities while reading an English article? (c) Do the levels of reading ability have a great influence on the use of metacognitive reading strategies?Sixty-eight full-time, first-year university students participated in the study (40 male and 28 female; 34 high- readers and 34 low-readers). The students completed data sets that were examined for a background questionnaire, the reading comprehension section,and the SORS-Survey of Reading Strategies, presented both in Chinese and English. The SORS questionnaire included three categories of reading strategies: global reading strategies, support reading strategies, and problem solving reading strategies. All subjects were asked to produce self-reported use of metacognitive reading strategies. The results indicated that JPU students reported using low overall metacognitive reading strategies when reading in English. More specifically, problem solving reading strategies were reported as the most frequently used strategies; global reading strategies were the next most frequently used strategies, and support reading strategies the least often employed.Furthermore, there was a statistically significant difference in the use of metacognitive reading strategies between high and low English reading ability students. That is, participants'English language proficiency had an impact on their use of metacognitive reading strategies. More proficient readers used more overall metacognitive reading strategies than less proficient readers while reading texts in English.Finally, pedagogical implications were suggested, such as L2 reading teachers might incorporate methods to teach these metacognitive reading strategies directly and explicitly to EFL students. It is necessary to teach low English reading ability students how to use strategies more appropriately and effectively. In addition, suggestions are offered for future research, such as employing multiple measurements, and examining a different student population was also addressed.