Metacognition And Its Correlation To Reading Comprehension For Non-English Majors

This study examined the effects of students' metacognitive knowledge on reading comprehension. Participants included 302 students of different specialties enrolled in Band-1 English classes in Shandong university. To obtain data, the students were asked to respond to metacognitive questionnaire consisting of 41 items on confidence, repair strategies, perceived and real effective strategies and difficulty factors. One TOFEL test was also administered to measure students' reading comprehension. The data were analyzed by using descriptive and inferential statistics for item means, percentages, frequencies, and standard deviations. One-way ANOVA models were conducted to investigate the possible differences between the mean results obtained from several samples, each referring to a different population divided by their specialty, sex, and strategies they used. Two-tailed correlation analysis was also performed to detect the relationship between metacognitive awareness and reading comprehension.Data analyses indicated that metacognition and reading comprehension were significantly correlated, and that a significant metacognition difference lied between males and females but not between students of different specialties. The results revealed that metacognitive strategies had a positive relationship to the reading test performance and students with higher level of metacognition exerted better achievement in reading comprehension. Successful readers tended to be more "global" or top-down in their perceptions of effective and difficulty-causing reading strategies. In contrast, less successful readers tended to be more "local" or bottom-up in their perceptions of effective and difficulty-causing reading strategies. In addition, a negative relationship was found between metamotivationand some strategies which the subjects described as effective, such as focusing on the general idea of the whole text rather than the meaning of each word. This study finally suggested that participants obtained more declarative knowledge than procedural or conditional knowledge.The key findings provide a new orientation for improving students' reading comprehension. In teaching practice, teachers can do some effort to make students aware of their metacognition. Also needed are training studies on the most effective instructional means for teaching reading strategies.