Metacognitive strategies used by selected DLSU freshmen in comprehending a narrative and expository text: An exploratory study

• Main Author: Gaerlan, Marianne Jennifer M.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Metacognition; Reading (Higher education); Reading comprehension; English language—Study and teaching—Filipino speakers; English Language and Literature; Reading and Language
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/6057
• Institution: De La Salle University

This study describes the metacognitive strategies used by skilled and less skilled readers in comprehending a narrative and an expository text in English. It further investigates how factors such as reading ability, interest, prior knowledge and text type affect strategy choice and use. The participants were freshmen enrolled in English One at De La Salle University-Manila (DLSU-M). Think aloud protocols, and responses to the Barnett questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were analyzed and interpreted. Results reveal that a dominant strategy used by the skilled readers with the narrative text is word monitoring, and with the expository text, they used a variety and no one strategy surfaced as dominant. The less skilled readers dominantly used comprehension monitoring with both narrative text and expository texts. Further, it was found that the factors mentioned above all appeared to affect strategy choice and use in the sense that readers use different types of strategies depending on their reading ability, and on the presence or absence of prior knowledge and interest. This might have implications for reading education in terms of encouraging the explicit teaching of the use of metacognition in reading. Likewise, a longer and more intensive training of students in the use of strategies is recommended.