Chinese Business-English-Major Graduate Students’ Metacognitive Reading Strategy Use For Reading English Academic Journal Articles

Reading strategy research in China has long focused on reading strategies of primary and middle school students while neglecting to facilitate graduate students’ reading strategy use for reading English academic journal articles.This research investigates systematically the metacognitive reading strategies employed by Business-Englishmajor graduate students(BE graduate students)in English academic journal article reading.The main research questions are as follows: 1)What is the pattern of metacognitive reading strategy use employed in the reading of English academic journal articles,as reported by Chinese BE graduate students? 2)What is the relationship between BE graduate students’(self-rated)English academic journal article reading ability and their use of metacognitive reading strategies? 3)What are the factors that may influence BE graduate students’ metacognitive reading strategy use?In order to address the above questions,this study invited 117 BE graduate students who completed a background and metacognitive reading strategy use questionnaire adapted from Mokhtari and Sheorey’s Survey of Reading Strategies(SORS)(2002)and a self-rating scale of English academic journal article reading ability designed based on the theory of learning process and the study of Zhou(2020).SPSS24 was adopted to analyze the data acquired.Descriptive statistics,Pearson product-moment correlation,and ANOVA were used to process the data.The study further applied content analysis of 9 graduate students’ interviews to elucidate factors that may influence BE graduate students’ metacognitive reading strategy use.The results show that: 1)Chinese BE graduate students,on the whole,used metacognitive reading strategies at medium-frequency level.Students’ prime preference was global reading strategies(GLOB)followed by problem-solving strategies(PROB)and support reading strategies(SUP);2)There was a significant relationship between BE graduate students’(self-rated)English academic journal article reading ability and their metacognitive reading strategy use(r=.646,p<.01).Students’ reading ability mainly correlated significantly with two strategy subcategories: the GLOB(r=.669,p<.01)and PROB(r=.571,p<.01);3)Grade and weekly English academic journal article reading hours had a significantly positive effect on students’ overall metacognitive reading strategy use.Moreover,BE graduate students reported on a variety of major-level,learner-level,teaching-level and task-level factors that influence their metacognitive reading strategy use.This study provides more objective and pertinent suggestions for Chinese BE graduate students as well as some pedagogical implications for Business English class.The researcher suggests it is crucial for all BE graduate students to be aware of the metacognitive reading strategies needed for efficient English academic journal article reading and form a good reading habit.It is also recommended that teachers in the department of Business English studies can increase BE graduate students’ metacognitive reading strategy awareness by: 1)figuring out students’ overall pattern of metacognitive reading strategy use and their strategy strength and weaknesses;2)teaching students explicitly the metacognitive reading strategies and encourage students to use these strategies in their reading process.