Fostering awareness of cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies in two foreign languages (English and Arabic) / Seyed Hassan Talebi ... [et al.]

This study attempted to find out the impact of Cognitive and Metacognitive Reading Strategy Instruction (CMRSI) in L2 (English) in increasing the awareness and use of these reading strategies not only in L2 in which the CMRSI was given but also in L3 (Arabic) in which no CMRSI was given as a result of transfer of reading strategies from L2 to L3. It also aimed to find out which strategy items were most and least improved both in L2 and L3 as a result of CMRSI in L2. Fifty five fourth-grade high school male students majoring in math-physics took part in this study. As the reading process is believed to be the same across languages (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2004), the participants were put into two groups of low and high awareness of reading strategies in L1 (Persian). Then, they were given reading comprehension tests in L2 and L3 as triggers for the main instrument (i.e., cognitive and metacognitive reading strategy questionnaire) in English and Arabic. After this pretest stage, the two groups underwent the CMRSI. The same pretest instruments were also given to the students as posttest. It was found that there was a significant difference in the awareness and use of cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies from pretest to posttest in English and Arabic for students of low and high strategic reading competence level. However, this improvement was not necessarily the same for different strategy items. It is important to teach reading strategies in L2 as it will have effect on increasing awareness of strategies both in L2 and in L3 as a result of transfer of reading strategies from one language to another. However, as not all strategy items show the same improvement from pretest to posttest, more attention should be paid to the item by item analysis of strategies after CMRSI to maximize students’ awareness of all strategy items equally.