Role of metalinguistic awareness intraining for reading: a quasi-experimental study with Saudi EFL learners

Research purpose

Generally, this study assesses the role of metalinguistic awareness in training for reading through an experimental study with EFLstudents. Specifically, it aims to answer the following queries:

Participants

The number of participants in this study is 70, with 35 each constituting the experimental and control groups. All participants are enrolled at the English department, Hail University. This is a purposefully chosen sample, i.e. the sample was chosen with the specific research objective in mind (Creswell, 2014). Purposeful sampling may be implemented in a variety of ways. In this study, criterion-based sampling was applied to ensure the quality of the results. Accordingly, the first-level students at the English Department were chosen as subjects for this study. Students at this level are assumed to be unfamiliar with metacognitive techniques. Using criterion-based sampling was deemed the most suitable to conduct this inquiry.

Procedures

Initially, both experimental and control group were administered a TOEFL test of reading comprehension skills to check their homogeneity. Only the experimental group received instruction in metacognitive methods, while the control group was taught the reading course traditionally. The former received instructions on how to read in order to encourage active engagement of students. Both the teacher and participants considered the pragmatic aspects of the situation in order to provide reliable results. Metacognitive strategies were taught three times a week, for an hour each time, to the experimental group. Students were given three categories of information: declarative knowledge (learning what strategies are), situational knowledge (learning where strategies might be used), and procedural knowledge (learning how to apply strategies). The data were collected after a 12-week period of metacognitive instruction through a questionnaire.

Instrument

The following is a short description of the instruments employed in this study: A TOEFL test extracted from the book “Building Skills for the TOEFL iBT, Beginning Reading” by Edmunds et al. (2009). It was clearly cited in the list of references. All the questions used for the pre-test were multiple choice type and the aim was to ascertain whether or not the students’ reading abilities were similar. The same TOEFL test was also used in the post-test to check the enhancement, if any, in the students’ reading comprehension skills. Each test contained 10 questions and no modifications were made in the original test. The test checks some reading strategies in the students’ comprehension including the meaning of certain vocabulary, the topic of a paragraph, detailed information, referent of a pronoun, comprehending the inference of a paragraph, the synonyms of a word, summary of a paragraph, inclusion of a sentence inside a paragraph, and summarizing the whole text in a few sentences. All the participants had to take reading exams at the beginning of the term. The assessments were designed to test students’ reading comprehension and ensure that the two groups were taught at the same level of understanding. Moreover, Beyer’s (1987) metacognitive strategy questionnaire was employed in this study to assess metacognitive methods by employing the four-pointLikert Scale (Never, Rarely, Often, and Always numerically converted to 1, 2, 3, 4 to quantify the results) for responses. The questionnaire is designed to obtain data on how students plan, monitor, and analyze their own progress while they learn a new language. As part of the pilot study, the questionnaire was administered to 12 students who shared demographics with the sample but were not included in the final survey. The reliability of the questionnaire used to assess metacognitive strategy was determined to be 0.85%. The questionnaire responses were interpreted using the proposed guide to determine their awareness of metacognitive.

Experimental and control group use of metacognitive strategies

For the experimental group, Table 3 shows that participants’ mean score of planning strategy use before and after training did not increase. As a result, the total mean score of monitoring (5.45, 11.35) and assessment (2.65, 7.01) may be interpreted to mean that the reading strategy use increased due to metacognitive strategy instruction. Monitoring and assessment strategies included the following: keeping the goal in mind, finding errors and determining when a sub-goal is met, identifying how to become free from errors, keeping one’s spacein sequence, choosing the next appropriate operations, and determining when to proceed. There are no significant changes in the control group when it comes to planning, monitoring, and assessment. Preparation strategies included the following steps: defining the goal, selecting an operation, predicting desirable results, identifying likely mistakes, and planning how to recover from errors. Metacognitive approaches were studied before and after the test to see whether explicit instruction had an effect.

Students’ performance in the experimental group improved when they are closely observed and evaluated, according to Table 4. Consequent to the training, the participants also utilize a larger variety of strategies. Monitoring and assessment are shown in Table 4 to have a significant impact on performance in the experimental group when compared to the control group. After training sessions, the former employs more strategies than they previously did. According to Table 4, there is no significant difference between the experimental group and control groups for planning in the pre- and post-tests: the Sig. values are (0.286, & 0.194), i.e., Sig. values >0.05. For the second element of metalinguistic awareness, i.e., monitoring, Table 4 shows that the difference is significant between the levels of application of this strategy only in the experimental groups. Sig. values are (0.000). Finally, for assessment the Sig values are (0.000 & 0.147). It is only significant in the experimental group.

Teaching metacognitive strategies proved effective in promoting the use of these tactics, according to the findings. Explicit instruction in these strategies is likely to enhance students’ comprehension scores on reading comprehension tests, based on the results of this study. As is reflected in the data, following training, the experimental group outperformed the control group and employed more monitoring and assessment processes than the control group. This finding is confirmed by Habibian’s (2015) who found that Singapore young learners began to use monitoring and assessment as a result of explicit training in metacognitive awareness. A person’s metacognitive talents allow him or her to choose and employ acceptable methods. Metacognitive training seems to have enhanced students’ reading comprehension. According to the findings of this study, metacognitive strategies may help students become more self-aware and better comprehend the language world around them. Using these approaches more often shows their value and usefulness once they are taught as in the present case scenario. Providing students with regular teaching on this method may help them build a habit of using these strategies when reading. Metacognitive awarenessshows that students who are familiar with these approaches expect them to be effective in the classroom. As a consequence, it is impossible to exaggerate the significance of a positive reading attitude in the classroom.

As stated by Amin (2019), it is reasonable to regard reading as the ultimate collaborative skill to be employed in school and throughout life. To seek information, acquire knowledge, and read books, English is required and is frequently employed as the medium of teaching in higher education. Reading is a critical life skill that contributes to a child’s success in school and later in life. In elementary sections, children must develop a variety of reading skills. According to Good et al. (2019), the major problem facing general education instructors and students in grades one through three is the learning of fundamental reading abilities. Nothing in education is more widely used as a measure to judge the effectiveness of schooling than literacy, which is founded on a solid foundation of fundamental reading abilities. Cirino et al. (2019) confirmed that for reading comprehension to be successful, a significant amount of time and effort must be put in, particularly when the text content or the words themselves are challenging. Students are expected to read more independently and to utilize reading to grasp topics in content courses beyond the early elementary grades, which is frequently the case during the first few years of school.

Izadi and Yarahmadzehi (2018) found that Baluch respondents in English detected and corrected a larger proportion of grammatical mistakes than Persian respondents in a study on metalinguistic awareness of students studying English. Furthermore, Baluch participants fixed errors in a more grammar-focused manner than Persian participants, who repaired errors in a more content-oriented manner. Although the differences were not statistically significant in this example, Baluch participants supplied a plentynumber of errors explanations and a more grammar-centredmethodology than Iranian participants in terms of error explanation. These differences were discovered on factors that were both comparable and different across the three languages. Dalona and Dalona (2019) investigated the metalinguistic awareness of multilingual first graders, and the findings showed that the children’s metalinguistic awareness is average. Grade 1 multilingual learners still need to improve their linguistic skill in English and Filipino, particularly in identifying syntactic errors, because they will be using these languages in their future academic pursuits. The study also asserts that early school-age children’s Cebuano metalinguistic knowledge helps them complete their linguistic tasks in Filipino and English. Similarly, Woll (2019) investigated how French people perceive their mother tongue. In the meta-semantic half of the exam, greater than one third of participants achieved the toplevel of metalinguistic analysis, compared to only 5% in the meta-grammatical half. This tendency may be associated with the fact that direct reference to grammatical elements was necessary to get maximum scores in the meta-grammatical segment, but not in the meta-semantic section, according to a study of coding processes.

The purpose of the study of Akbulut (2019) was to determine the effect of morphological therapy on the morphological awareness and reading comprehension skills of students enrolled in a foreign language class. The study employed an experimental approach and comprised 74 freshmen at the Translation & Interpreting Department. The experimental group outperformed the control group in MCT and RCT, as determined by the findings. In other words, the experimental group’s morphological awareness improved significantly; also, their reading comprehension abilities improved significantly. Additionally, it can be stated that the participants profited efficiently and consciously from the explicit morphological awareness training session, which aided in their metalinguistic capacity development. The strengthof using video-based in training students on reading comprehensionstrategiesand metalinguistic awareness in learning a target language was investigated by Núñez-Vázquez and Crismán-Pérez (2017) in a non-parametric research. The test was completed by 30 pupils. The cloze test is part of the TAELIS test (Test for the Assessment of the English Language in the School). The results showed that there are statistical differences between school 2 (single videos) and school 3 (many videos or video-based). This presupposes that pupils have more reading practice, that words become more familiar, and that their orthographic vocabulary expands. As a result, pupils learn to play with language, which has an impact on metalinguistic awareness. The goal of the study of Hung and Loh (2020) was to see how cognitive flexibility affects metalinguistic abilities and reading comprehension in elementary school. The cognitive flexibility, metalinguistic skills such as syntactic awareness (word order knowledge), morphosyntactic competence, and discourse awareness (sentence order knowledge), and reading comprehension tests were completed by 49 third-grade primary school students. Reading comprehension is substantially predicted by syntactic awareness, morphosyntactic competence, discourse awareness, and cognitive flexibility, according to the results of hierarchical regression analysis.

Underlying data

Figshare: Underlying data for ‘Role of metalinguistic awareness intraining for reading: a quasi-experimental study with Saudi EFL learners’

Assessment Questionnaire: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.18925811.v1

Descriptive Analysis: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.18925223.v1

Three Way ANOVA Test: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.18923801.v1

Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0).