The Impact Of Reading Materials On Metacomprehension Accuracy

Metacomprehension is a branch of cognitive field. A person's metacomprehensionaccuracy is operationalized as the intra-individual correlation between a person'scomprehension ratings and his or her test performance, and the metacomprehension accuracyincludes absolute accuracy and relative accuracy. The research of metacomprehension accuracyand its effect are one of key issues in the study of metacomprehension. Over two decades'research of metacomprehension has demonstrated that people's metacomprehension accuracy isusually quite poor. It may be influenced by the nature of materials, the way of reading andprocessing, the consistency of the processing course and the testing way which is also calledtransfer appropriate and so on. This paper focuses on the impact of reading materials andcorresponding tests to metacomprehension accuracy, which is an important factor tometacomprehension accuracy.PurposePurpose:TO explore the impact of characteristics of reading materials including text difficulty,native or non-native language and the differences of material difficulty among the various textsto metacomprehension accuracy.Method:This research included three experiments. They all were designed with groups, and therewere 20 participants in each group. The participants were college students includingundergraduate and postgraduate who had passed the CET6, and their scores of CET6 wereneither very high nor very low. The major and gender of the participants were balanced.Experiment 1, two groups participants were randomly assigned to read materials of CET6and CET4 respectively, after that some corresponding tests were finished by each of theparticipants. The purpose of it was to find out the difference of metacomprehension accuracywhen reading materials of different difficulty.Experiment 2, two groups participants were randomly assigned to read materials of CET6and its Chinese version,after that some corresponding tests were finished by each of theparticipants. The purpose of it was to find out the difference of metacomprehension accuracywhen reading materials under the conditions of native and non-native language.Experiment 3,based on the experiment 1, a new group was assigned to read mixedmaterials including CET3,CET4,CET6 and Professional 8,after that some corresponding testswere finished by each of the participants. The purpose of it was to find out the difference ofmetacomprehension accuracy when reading materials under different conditions.ResultsResults:Experiment 1,for absolute accuracy,the participants who read materials of CET4performed better than the participants who read materials of CET6. But for relative accuracy,there was no significant difference in their performance,the result did not support the optimumeffort hypothesis.Experiment 2,for absolute accuracy,the value of subjective evaluation of theunderstanding to Chinese version were higher than English version, but the number of correctanswers to questions had no significant differences between the two. And there was nosignificant difference in relative accuracy between the two.Experiment 3, the mixed English materials got higher relative accuracy than CET4 andCET6 materials.Conclusion:The difficulty of materials had an impact on metacomprehension accuracy. For absoluteaccuracy, the more difficult materials were, the lower accuracy was. And for relative accuracy,the impact of materials was relatively complex. Overall, the optimum effort hypothesis still held,too difficult or too easy for the material was not conducive to the awakening of metacognition,so that relative accuracy would be influenced. When the difficulty of the materials wasmoderate, the accuracy was high. But this medium was a wide range of moderate.The impact on metacomprehension accuracy under the conditions of native and non-native:under native conditions, the participant was easier to process and understand reading materialsthan non-native conditions. Usually, the absolute accuracy in the context of native language washigher than in the context of non-native language context, but not necessarily the relative accuracy was.The degree of difficulty difference among the texts had a significant impact on relativeaccuracy. When other conditions remained unchanged, the larger the degree was, the higherrelative accuracy was. Conversely, the lower relative accuracy was.Based on this study, the paper prospected the future and application of metacomprehensionat the end.