Incidence of Systematic Explicit Instruction of Metacognitive Reading Strategies on Students' Academic Achievement

Graciela Adriana Lamas,

Department of English, Sede Regional Orán, National University of Salta, Argentina

This project aims at researching on the effectiveness of explicit instruction of metacognitive reading strategies on tests taken to 20-30-year-old university students from Orán, a city in the north-west of Salta, in Argentina, whose native language is Spanish. It explores the field of language teaching and learning seen from the cognitive perspective. It is a qualitative-quantitative, process-oriented, small-scale, subjective, phenomenologist, and quasi-experimental, prospective action research work with controlled intervention focused on making students aware of the metacognitive strategies needed to be able to comprehend field-based expository text types. It is meant to help them improve their ability to deal with definitions, descriptions, classifications, narrations, instructions and arguments by putting metacognitive strategies into practice. In 2022, both the control and the experimental group attended a compulsory reading comprehension course in L2, English, in the 4th year of the Nursing Training Bachelor Studies offered by the School of Health Sciences at the National University of Salta. Only the experimental group received instruction regarding metacognition. The data collected included students’ level of English, general reading comprehension level (based on the CEFR, 2020), metacognitive awareness of reading strategies before the period of instruction and after the practice tests taken, scores compared out of ten practice tests on different text types, metacognitive strategies put into practice while doing each practice test, frequency of use of each metacognitive strategy. Based on the qualitative and quantitative information collected from the experimental group, the teacher will interpret the results to assess academic achievement.

Keywords: Metacognition, Reading Strategies, Field-Content Based Texts, Expository Text-Types, Effectiveness, Academic Achievement

The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Eighth International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.LLLD.IR), 14-15 February 2023, Ahwaz.