article review 39

Metacognition and reading: Investigating intervention and

comprehension of EFL freshmen in Turkey

The results reveal that METARESTRAP accelerates Turkish young adult university EFL learners’ reading comprehension by providing awareness of metacognition along with declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge about metacognitive reading strategies. METARESTRAP promoted learners’ self-reported metacognitive reading strategy use while conventional reading instruction did not affect it. This may imply that after implementation, readers are able to better control their reading process. First of all, they are aware of the

available metacognitive reading strategies and have a good repertoire of efficient reading strategies from which they can select appropriate ones in relation to their current reading task. Thus, they can better control the process, which in turn results in better reading comprehension due to more effective use of metacognitive reading strategies. In addition to improved control of the reading process, METARESTRAP is also beneficial for achieving better performance in matching type cohesion, coherence, text structure, and global meaning questions. As METARESTRAP encourages readers to pay attention to thematic relationships between paragraphs, readers are better able to realize the flow of ideas in relation to the genre of the text. Thus, they can be regarded as interactive readers who start reading a text having gained a general understanding.