Metacognitive Reading Strategies Use by English and French Foreign Language Learners

Abstract

he present study aims to investigate the use of metacognitive reading strategies by 240 fourth-year students majoring in English Language and Literature or French Language and Literature at Jordanian universities. The Survey of Reading Strategies Questionnaire (SORS) (Mokhtari and Sheorey, 2002) was used for data collection. It consists of 30 items divided into three reading strategies: Problem Solving strategies, Support strategies, and Global strategies. The findings showed that English language learners and French language learners reported moderate use of metacognitive reading strategies and a tendency towards the use of Global reading strategy (M= 3.06) more than Support (M= 3.01) and Problem Solving (M= 2.88) strategies. Significant differences existed in the categories of metacognitive reading strategies use between the two groups of the study. The findings indicated that foreign language learners might recognize which strategies to use, but they may not have knowledge of how to use them successfully. They need to know how to use reading strategies correctly not only to know which strategies to employ. It is recommended that larger-scale studies be conducted to investigate the relationship among reading strategies of language learners, texts of different difficulties and lengths, and learning styles. Keywords: Metacognitive reading strategies, global strategies, support strategies, problem.