Differences in the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies among native and non-native readers

Abstract

In this study, we examine differences in the reported use of reading strategies of native and non-native English speakers when reading academic materials. Participants were 302 college students (150 native-English-speaking US and 152 ESL students), who completed a survey of reading strategies aimed at discerning the strategies readers report using when coping with academic reading tasks. Results of the study revealed, first, that both US and ESL students display awareness of almost all of the strategies included in the survey. Secondly, both groups attribute the same order of importance to categories of reading strategies in the survey, regardless of their reading ability or gender: cognitive strategies (the deliberate actions readers take when comprehension problems develop), followed by metacognitive strategies (advanced planning and comprehension monitoring techniques), and support strategies (the tools readers seek out to aid comprehension). Thirdly, both ESL and US high-reading-ability students show comparable degrees of higher reported usage for cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies than lower-reading-ability students in the respective groups, and while the US high-reading-ability students seem to consider support reading strategies to be relatively more valuable than low-reading-ability US students, ESL students attribute high value to support reading strategies, regardless of their reading ability level. Lastly, in the US group, the females report significantly higher frequency of strategy usage; this gender effect is not reflected in the ESL sample.