The correlation between metacognitive reading strategies and reading comprehension of english department students

The present research explored the metacognitive reading strategies used by university students and the correlation between metacognitive reading strategies (Global, Problem-Solving, and Support reading strategies) and reading comprehension. Specifically, the objectives of this research are four-folds, namely to identify metacognitive reading strategies used by the students during reading, to find the correlation between Global Reading Strategies (GLOB) and reading comprehension, to find the correlation between Problem-Solving Reading Strategies (PROB) and reading comprehension, and to find the correlation between Support Reading Strategies (SUPP) and reading comprehension. A survey on metacognitive reading strategies and a reading comprehension test were administered to identify students’ metacognitive reading strategies and comprehension performance. The subjects were 31 students of English Department at a university in Surabaya. The findings revealed that students preferred to use PROB reading strategies the most, followed by GLOB reading strategies, and SUPP reading strategies. This finding on prime preferences indicates that students had a tendency to concentrate and monitor their comprehension, particularly when they had difficulties in doing the reading test. In terms of correlation, the findings revealed that (1) a positive, moderate (at .66) correlation between GLOB strategies and reading comprehension, (2) a positive, strong correlation (at .72) between PROB strategies and reading comprehension, and (3) a positive, weak correlation (at .26) between SUPP strategies and reading comprehension. In general, the overall correlation between metacognitive reading strategies and reading comprehension was positive and strong at .79. The aforementioned correlation results tell us that students whose metacognitive reading awareness was high performed better in their reading comprehension than students whose metacognitive reading awareness was low