An investigation on the effects of using cognitive and metacognitive strategies to enhance university students' reading skills

This study aimed to find out the students' current situation regarding their use of reading strategies while they read texts written in English, and to investigate to what extent cognitive and metacognitive strategy training increases the students' reading strategy use. The Participants were 27 preparatory class students aged between 18 and 21 years old. The study was conducted at Inonu University in Malatya, Turkey. The data collection procedure consisted of two periods. The first period was carried out during the last four weeks of the first semester in 2015-2016 academic year. The second period was completed during the first four weeks of the second semester in 2015-2016 academic year. In the first period of the reading strategy instruction, the researcher mainly focused on cognitive strategy training and in the second period on metacognitive reading strategies. The methodological approach taken in the study was a mixed methodology based on a case study. In order to triangulate the data, both quantitative and qualitative methods were used. Qualitative data collected from the follow-up semi-structured interviews, think-aloud protocol, learner and researcher's diaries were descriptively analyzed. Quantitative data were imported into SPSS version 2.0, and then statistically analyzed. The findings of the study revealed that the students increased their strategy use after an eight-week strategy training program. A future study investigating metacognitive reading strategies was suggested to be conducted over a longer period of time.