The effect of metacognitive strategy training on improving the achievement level of students having low achievement levels of reading comprehension

A native language teaching which improves both reading skills and reading comprehension skills is inevitable for a language to fulfill its functions in both individual and societal fields. Turkish course has a great importance in elementary education aiming at having individuals become socialized, acculturated, keep up to date, and become prepared to an upper level education and life academically, physically, mentally and emotionally. Studies on Turkish courses, especially on reading and reading comprehension levels, have shown that students have not reached the objectives in this field which is important in native language teaching. The reasons why students cannot understand what they read are the students? not being able to assimilate new information, not knowing the necessary comprehension techniques and methods, and few teaching activities and similar reasons. Similarly, in recent years studies carried out in abroad especially on reading comprehension it has been observed that using some techniques and strategies such as planning, organizing, guessing, trying are effective on viii improving the reading comprehension level. One of the means which is going to be used in Turkish courses to improve the skills is learning strategies. Metacognitive strategies are frequently used in this field. This study, aiming at determining the effect of metacognitive strategy training on improving the achievement level of students having low achievement levels of reading comprehension, is carried out according to the experimental study model having control group and pre-test and post-test. 5th grade students attending to Yunus Emre Primary School and Sehit M. Ali Durak Primary School in Yenimahalle, Ankara have participated in this study during 2006-2007 academic year. The study is carried out by totally 33 students, 17 in experimental group and 16 in control group. Reading comprehension achievement test, metacognitive reading comprehension self-awareness scale and interviews have been used as data gathering tools. However, some activities have been developed and used during the teaching process. SPSS software program has been used in all statistical analysis related to the study, and whether there is a significant difference between the scores of control group and experimental group has been tested by ?t? test. The significance level has been found as .05 in comparisons between groups. The results gained through study are as follows: 1. There is a significant difference in favor of control group which has the metacognitive strategy training in reading comprehension achievement level. In other words, the taught metacognitive strategies are effective on improving the level of reading comprehension skills. ix 2. There is a significant difference in favor of control group which has the metacognitive strategy training in using metacognitive reading comprehension self-awareness skills. That is to say, metacognitive strategy training applied to control group is effective on improving metacognitive reading comprehension self-awareness levels. 3. There is a significant difference in favor of control group in student views related to using metacognitive reading comprehension selfawareness levels. In other words, applied strategy training is effective on control group students to use and assimilate the strategies.