Comprehension Strategies on Iranian

Knowledge of the strategies used by English as a foreign language (EFL) or second language (ESL) readers can help instructors teach these techniques and thereby enhance their students ’ reading comprehension. The present study compared three categories of reading comprehension strategies (meta-cognitive, cognitive, and socio-affective) to determine their effects on 31 EFL students ’ reading comprehension. A standard reading comprehension test taken from the First Certificate in English (FCE) and a questionnaire were used to collect the data. The results of the analysis using Chi-square tests revealed both positive and negative strategies, showing that metacognitive strategies have positive effects on reading comprehension. Pedagogical im-plications are also discussed. Since the rise of the mentalist model of language learning in linguistics and cognitive psychology, the domi-nant approach in language learning and teaching has become a learner-centered one. More attention has been paid to what the learner actually does while involved in the learning task. In other words, the process Comparison of reading comprehension strategies 47 48 Journal of College Reading and Learning, 37 (2), Spring 2007 of language learning has become as important as its product. As Ellis (1985) put it, a complete account of second language acquisition (SLA) involves both showing how the input is shaped to make it learnable (an inter-organ-ism perspective) and how the learner works on the input to turn it into intake (an intra-organism perspective). (p. 163) So, procedural knowledge that consists of the strategies and proce-dures employed by a learner to process second language (SL) data for acquisition and use has proved to be an important part of the second language (L2) knowledge. Many studies have been conducted on dif-ferent factors that affect learning to read (Adamson, 1991; Block, 1992