University Students’ Awareness of Meta-cognitive Reading Strategies and Reading Comprehension

The current research paper reports a study investigating the awareness of Sargodha university post graduate students’ about meta-cognitive reading strategies use and reading comprehension of the academic material in English as a foreign language. The data was collected through a questionnaire (MARSI) particularly designed to expose the kinds of reading strategies adult learners report exploiting when reading academic materials (Mukhtari and Reichard, 2002). The questionnaire was accompanied by a comprehension test to judge the reading ability of the students. The outcomes of the study expose that on the whole these post graduate university students are aware of all the strategies included in the present research, with an inclination towards global strategies, followed by support and problem solving strategies respectively. However, when reading ability was considered in relation to the comprehension test, the students with preference for problem strategies scored higher as compared to the students with preference for global and support strategies. Moreover, disparity was found between male and female students in their awareness of metacognitive strategies use and comprehension test scores.

Keywords: Reading strategies and comprehension, academic text, meta-cognition, awareness