• Saeed Shamsini

  Author

• Seyyed Ahmad Mousavi

  Author

The present study aims at investigating the effects of metacognitive awareness of EFL
sophomore university students on the reading comprehension performance. Metacognitive
learning strategies may help L2 learners to be more independent, and autonomous. Students
without meta-cognitive approaches are essentially learners without direction and ability to
review their progress, accomplishments, and future learning directions (O‘Malley, et al. 1985).
Three intact classes (N= 75) from among sophomore EFL Iranian undergraduates participated
in this study. The classes were randomly assigned to summarization, question-generation (as
metacognitive strategies), and control groups. The participants were given the reading
comprehension section of the TOEFL as the pre-test. The experimental groups were taught how
to prepare a summary out of a reading passage or generate questions, while the control group
received no particular metacognitive training. In the end, the participants were post-tested by
taking the reading comprehension section of the TOEFL. The results (in the contrary to the
researchers’ expectation) indicated that the experimental groups’ mean scores were a little
higher than that of the control group; however, using the one-way ANOVA, the differences
observed between the means were not significant to reject the null hypotheses. This may suggest
that short-term instruction of metacognitive strategies may not be so effective in improving EFL
learners’ reading comprehension ability.

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