An Investigation into Chinese College EFL Students’ Metacognitive Awareness of Academic Reading Strategies
This study tries to explore Chinese EFL students’ metacognitive awareness and perceived use of academic reading strategy in one south college. A total of 38 students responded to a 30-item Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), which was adopted from Mokhtari and Sheorey (2002). The reading strategies were classified into three categories: Global, Problem-solving and Support strategies. The collected data showed students’ relatively frequent uses of three categories of reading strategies, and high metacognitive awareness. A close relation between strategy uses and reading proficiency was also found. Students with high reading proficiency applied more strategies than the intermediate- and the low-proficiency group. Additionally, good readers displayed a higher frequent use of Global and Problem-solving strategies than poor readers. These findings might provide L2 reading researchers, reading curricula designers or practicing teachers with some insights into students’ reading processes. Therefore, effective reading instruction can be adjusted to students’ reading needs and designed to prepare students to be more strategic and independent readers.
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