The Effect of Teaching Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies on EFL Students' Reading Comprehension Across Proficiency Levels

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to find out whether teaching “cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies” affects EFL students' reading comprehension across proficiency levels.To that end, one hundred and eighty B.A. students majoring in English from Azad University were randomly selected and were divided into three proficiency groups on the basis of their scores on the quick Test of Michigan. Subsequently, the subjects at each proficiency level were divided into two equal sub-groups, and were randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups. The subjects in each experimental group were taught the desired cognitive and metacognitive strategies, whereas those in the control groups received some sort of instruction on vocabulary and structure. At the end, all the subjects were given reading comprehension tests geared at their proficiency levels.The data thus collected were then analyzed by SPSS statistical package to find out the difference between the means of the groups through the estimation of independent samples t-tests. The results revealed that “teaching cognitive and metacognitive strategies” had no significanteffects on the reading comprehension of elementary students, neither did it have any effect on the reading comprehension of advanced students. However, teaching such strategies had significant effects on the reading comprehension of intermediate students.