The Impact of Two Rhetorical Structures on Metacognitive Awareness and Reading Strategies for Four Groups of EFL Readers

Abstract

This paper is aimed at providing a review of the impact of rhetorical text structure (inductive versus deductive) on the selection of metacognitive reading strategies when reading expository texts in English in the domain of EFL non-English-major college students in Taiwan. It thus explores what strategies EFL students use to engage English expository texts. A Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) was given to 163 EFL college freshmen who were placed into four groups according to their English test scores to determine whether the application of reading strategies were varied according to different rhetorically structured texts among the ”high proficiency group”, ”above average proficiency group”, ”average proficiency group”, and ”low proficiency group”. The results of the comparison among the four groups show that the impact of scores on the selection of metacognitive reading strategies on two English expository texts were not statistically significant across English reading levels. In spite of the results, this study suggested that learners with higher English proficiency levels are more strategic in the use of metacognitive reading strategies, but lower English proficiency learners would enhance their EFL reading skills when they are able to allocate efficient reading strategies to carry out high-level cognitive processes with more ”global strategies”.