Assessing YDS test takers' metacognitive awareness levels of reading strategies and their attitudes towards reading

In our country if someone wants to be an academician or a state employee, to get language allowance or take expertness in his/her professional occupation he/she has to pass Foreign Language Examination (YDS) which is officially recognized as a national language proficiency tests in Turkey and, preferred by the vast majority of people due to many reasons. The sections of the test, known to evaluate the reading skills of the test takers, cover the considerable part and effect the test result significantly. YDS test takers generally complain about the failure in these sections of the test, which include difficult reading passages mostly taken from academic articles to assess test takers' reading comprehension, attention, and coherence knowledge with a number of inferential and explicit questions. Reading and the ability to comprehend a written text have been one of the most complicated issues to understand its process considering its requirement for cognitive skills. This study aimed at finding out whether the difficulties that YDS test takers face in reading comprehension arise from the lack of the usage (cognitive strategies) and awareness (metacognitive strategies) of reading strategies in FL reading. Two different surveys were administered to randomly selected participants 30 graduate EFL learners in different professional fields, and undergraduates in different majors. The data were analyzed quantitatively with the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), to develop descriptive statistics and, both surveys were analyzed for internal consistency by using Cronbach's alpha. The relationship between the participants' attitudes and their metacognitive skills was also measured with the assistance of Pearson correlation analysis to build up a clear picture of the correlation. The findings of the instruments demonstrated that YDS test takers are metacognitively skilled FL readers and, the problem solving strategies were reported as reading strategies employed by YDS test takers most frequently, indicating that the participants were generally aware of their comprehension process and were able to use the focused techniques when they come across problems in comprehending textual information. It was also found that YDS test takers have positive attitudes towards reading and, the degree of YDS test takers' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies does not have a strong relationship with their reading attitude. It has provided an evidence that YDS test takers' lack of metacognitive strategy use is not a reason why YDS test takers have difficulties in FL reading during the test.