EFL University Students’ Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategy and Its Correlation with Their Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Metacognitive awareness of reading strategy has a tremendous impact on the educational process, especially in acquiring a second language. It is concerned with not only what they suggest about how students organize their interactions with the context, but also with how they might employ the strategies that are still relevant to reading comprehension effectiveness. However, the EFL learners are still having a lack using metacognitive awareness of reading strategies significantly because of unknowing and inadequate understanding of what reading strategies to use, how and when to use them appropriately. Hence, the present study is attempted to locate the relationship between EFL learners’ metacognitive awareness of reading strategy and reading comprehension. A quantitative study, with 60 EFL students as participants, was conducted by using a questionnaire, and reading comprehension score to discover the level of EFL students’ Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategy. Those are the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategy Inventory - revised (MARSI-R) and the Test English Proficiency (TEP) to discover the level of EFL students’ metacognitive awareness. The result of this study showed that 49 participants (mean 3.5 – >3.5), categorized as high group levels, and 11 participants (mean 2.5 – 3.4), categorized as moderate group levels. This research also revealed that the most strategies used by EFL learners found using PRS (Problem-solving strategies) M = 3.99; GRS (Global reading strategies) M = 3.98; and, SRS (Support reading strategies) M = 3.65. For the result of the Spearman Rho Coefficient showed that there is no correlation between EFL learners’ metacognitive awareness of reading strategy and reading comprehension (ρ value = .986).