Reading comprehension in EFL education: Multimodal semiotic approach, attitudes and metacognitive awareness

Reading comprehension is one of the ultimate aims of English language teaching. To achieve this aim, traditional text-bound reading instruction practices such as translation and making detailed grammatical explanations are still being used today. However, thanks to the technological advancements, today's reading tasks have gained a new semiotic environment conveying meaning to readers through various modes such as visuals and sounds alongside words. Therefore, it can be concluded that traditional reading instruction practices do not reflect authentic reading tasks. Also, previous studies conducted in various EFL contexts showed that the application of multimodal teaching approach and employing semiotic signs were effective in improving students' reading comprehension. By combining the multimodal and semiotic approaches, this study aimed to explore their combined effect on English reading comprehension through the multimodal semiotic approach (MSA), students' attitudes towards MSA, and the relationships of MSA's effect on reading comprehension levels with attitudes towards MSA and with metacognitive awareness levels of reading strategies (MARS) in Turkish EFL context, so far uninvestigated in the literature. Post-test only with nonequivalent comparison groups design was employed with two groups of students studying ELT at a state university in Turkey to explore the effect of MSA. Then, a Likert-type survey was administered to experimental group to discover their MARS and attitudes towards MSA. The findings indicated that MSA was helpful in increasing students' reading comprehension levels, attitudes towards MSA were positive, and there were positive relationships of reading comprehension levels by MSA with the attitudes and with the MARS levels. Keywords: multimodality, semiotics, reading comprehension, attitude, metacognitive awareness, english language teaching