Arab Educational Information Network

Metacognitive reading strategy use plays a significant role in reading comprehension and the educational process, more generally. In spite of its importance, it has long been ignored in English language teaching, research, learning, and assessment. Hence, the present study aimed to explore students’ perceptions of use of metacognitive reading strategies and to detect whether any relationship existed between EFL Lebanese secondary learners' overall use of metacognitive reading strategies and their literal and higher order reading comprehension. Moreover, the study attempted to examine if the participants' use of any of the types of metacognitive reading strategies: global (GLOB), problem-solving (PROB), and support (SUP) are predictors of their literal and higher order reading comprehension scores. Two instruments were employed to gather the data: The Survey of Reading Strategies SORS (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002), a self-reported instrument which examined the participants’ extent of metacognitive perceptions of use, and the TOEFL reading comprehension test which was used to measure the participants’ reading comprehension performance at both the literal and the higher order levels. Five intact first secondary classes participated in the study. The participants were ten graders (males and females) selected from five public schools in Saida, and their ages ranged from 15 to 17 years old. Descriptive statistics were computed to measure students’ perceptions of use of the metacognitive strategies. In addition, Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were computed to determine the relationships between the overall use of metacognitive reading strategies, the types of strategies, (GLOB, PROB, and SUP), and literal and higher order reading comprehension. Furthermore, two stepwise multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the relative role of each of the global (GLOB), problem-solving (PROB), and support (SUP) reading strategies in predicting literal and higher order reading comprehension. The results showed that the PROB strategy and the SUP strategy were significant predictors of the literal reading comprehension. For higher order reading comprehension, the PROB strategy was a significant predictor. Finally, pedagogical implications for teachers, learners and curriculum designers in the field of EFL teaching/learning are presented.(Author's Abstract)