Comparison of Turkish EFL university students' use of reading strategies in L1 and L2 and the possible effects of the reading strategy instruction on their L1 and L2

In this study, the main aim was to investigate the students? awareness of reading strategies and to determine the strategies to be taught explicitly, to examine the effect of a four-week strategy instruction in both L1 and L2, and to see which level would benefit more from strategy training- low ability readers or high ability readers. In order to realize these aims, both qualitative (questionnaires with open-response items and interview) and quantitative (pre- and post-tests) research methods were utilized to get in-depth understanding and results.For the purposes of the study, thirty-four preparatory school students of a private university in Istanbul participated in this study. Fourteen of the participants were intermediate and twenty of them were pre-intermediate level students. A self-designed questionnaire with open-response items (adapted from the questionnaire with 25 Likert-type items used by Bezci, 1998 (cited by Civelek, M, 2006) under the headings of pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading) was used in order to measure students? awareness of reading strategies in both L1 and L2. The same questionnaire was administered to assess reading strategy use in two languages on different days by changing the order of questions and adding the word `Turkish? to the questions in the one for L1. In addition, to investigate the effects of the strategy instruction, pre tests in English and Turkish, which were administered as post tests as well, were chosen from TOEFL IBT (Longman, Preparation course for the TOEFL test by Deborah Phillips, 2006); for the Turkish test, a test from that book was translated into Turkish by the researcher and three English instructors. Also, the students from both intermediate and pre-intermediate levels were interviewed and asked five questions in order to increase the reliability of the test results. Finally, the subjects answered a background questionnaire about their age, gender, the years of exposure to English and the ways they use to improve their English.The analysis of the quantitative data revealed that the instruction enabled the students in both levels to improve their reading in English although the pre-intermediate level showed more success than the intermediate group. In relation to the test in Turkish, there was no significant difference between the pre and post tests of the intermediate group. However, a slight difference can be seen between the Turkish pre and post tests of the pre-intermediate level. It shows that lower level benefited much more from the reading strategy instruction in English and Turkish than the intermediate group. Furthermore, the analysis of the questionnaires as the qualitative data revealed that both high and low ability readers seemed to be using the same kinds of reading strategies, but low ability readers without knowing how to use a strategy successfully and orchestrate its use with other strategies (Anderson, 1991). Lastly, the analysis of other qualitative data, focus group interviews, showed that the students in both levels gained awareness of not only what reading strategies to use, but also how to use them successfully and orchestrate their use with other strategies through the four-week instruction, which is called metacognitive awareness.