Metacognitive awareness and the actual use of reading strategies among undergraduate L2 speakers of Arabic: An exploratory study
Alhaqbani, Ahmad . 2013
Abstract
This study has two goals: firstly, it aims to investigate undergraduate students’ metacognitive awareness of and their actual use of reading strategies; secondly, it aims to explore how certain variables affect the students’ perceived and actual use of strategies while reading Arabic academic texts.
This study adopted a mixed method approach in which a survey, think-aloud protocol, and semi-structured interviews were utilised. The quantitative phase, using the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002), examined 122 students’ metacognitive awareness of reading strategies when reading Arabic academic texts. The qualitative phase, using think-aloud protocol and semi-structured interviews, explored the actual reading strategies 28 students used while reading. Students' demographic and educational characteristics were also included in both quantitative and qualitative phases of the study. The findings of the quantitative phase showed a preference for problem-solving strategies. Moreover, a significant correlation was found between the participants’ background, self-rated reading ability, and most notably, level of education with their metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. The qualitative phase uncovered somewhat different findings in terms of strategy ranking and the impact of the readers’ characteristics on strategy use. Looking at the findings from the two data sets and analyses, it can be said that level of education is the most important factor which influenced these participants' reading behaviour. Senior students were found to be more oriented towards global meaning of the texts and less dependent on problem-solving strategies, especially text-related strategies. In contrast, freshmen students were oriented towards local meaning of the texts and lower-level processing. Findings of the study are discussed and theoretical and practical implications of the findings are presented in the thesis
