Relationships between Chinese College Test Takers’ Strategy Use and EFL Reading Test Performance: A Structural Equation Modeling Approach

Abstract

This article investigates the relationships between test takers’ strategy use and test performance on an EFL reading test. For this study 209 Chinese college students were invited to participate in a reading comprehension test and answer a 30-item strategy use questionnaire. Results showed that two factors underlay test takers’ reading test performance: lexico-grammatical reading ability (LEX-GR) and text comprehension reading ability (TxtCOM). In addition, metacognitive strategy use had a significant and direct effect on cognitive strategy use, implying that the former performed an executive function over the latter. Monitoring strategies were found to have a significant effect on LEX-GR and evaluating strategies significantly affected TxtCOM, suggesting that metacognitive strategy use played an important role on the reading test. Pedagogical implications are also discussed.