CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Rationale

Metacognition refers to “thinking about thinking” and was introduced as a concept in by

John Flavell, who is typically seen as a founding scholar of the field. Flavell said that metacognition

is the knowledge you have of your own cognitive processes or your thinking (Flavell,1979). It is your

ability to control your thinking processes through various strategies, such as organizing, monitoring,

and adapting. Additionally, it is your ability to reflect upon the tasks or processes you undertake and

to select and utilize the appropriate strategies necessary in your intercultural interactions.

Meta-cognitive reading strategy awareness in reading is defined as the reader-performed

actions such as planning, monitoring, or evaluating the success of a particular learning

task (O'Malley & Chamot, 1994). Metacognition is not going to develop until a child is “leaning

forward” with reading, until she is engaged and motivated to improve her literacy skills and

attack each text with a plan, motivated and engaged. Metacognitive reading strategies are about

taking charge of reading, monitoring comprehension while reading. Students that read with

metacognition constantly ask themselves “Do I understand what I just read?” or “What is the

main point here?” It requires constant attention and a questioning mindset.

` And ultimately, it means being able to determine the relevance of new information, to put

it in the right context. Metacognitive skills will improve with practice. But there are two

foundational skills that must be in place before that practice can truly start which are the ability

to think while reading and motivation to lean forward attitude to reading. Many struggling

readers are unable to think while reading because the act of decoding, sounding out words, takes

up too much concentration.or many people, reading is a lifelong passion. This is because they
read effortlessly and they get a great deal out of every book. They understand it perfectly, and

the content makes them think, takes them to far away places, or entertains them. They find

reading rewarding.

If you are not able to read with comprehension, reading is not rewarding. If decoding is

inefficient or vocabulary or language understanding is compromised, reading is a chore, possibly

a source of humiliation, definitely not a joy. These struggling readers find it hard to lean forward

into reading.

Hence, there is a growing concern regarding students' reading ability, especially for

nonnative language learners in English classes. Students seem to have limited ability to interpret

the information from the texts, think critically and use context clues to find meaning. Reading

comprehension instruction in many classrooms focuses on teacher-generated questions or is

based on textbook instruction, which measures comprehension of a specific text rather than

metacognitive strategies for comprehending texts (National Institute for Educational Policy

Research, NIER, 2002).

Metacognitive reading strategy awareness plays a significant role in reading

comprehension and educational process. In spite of its importance, metacognitive strategy has

long been the ignored skill in English language teaching, research, learning, and assessment.

This lack of good metacognitive reading strategy skill is exacerbated by the central role of

reading comprehension in education success. One solution to the problem of poor reading

comprehension is the learning of metacognitive reading strategy skills. Metacognitive reading

strategy ability needs to be focused in language learning and teaching (Ahmadi, et al., 2013).

Since the improving number of international communication, traveling and studying in

abroad, students need to learn four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing for their
success. But reading comprehension is one of the main important elements for their English

language learning. Research shows that reading is a complex process and students usually have

difficulties in constructing meaning from writing text (Grabe & Stoller, 2002). General study

suggests that who starts to learn English language is most likely to have serious difficulties in

constructing meaning and understanding of the texts. This difficulty has been focused by

investigators for a long time and in recent years, they suggested that metacognitive reading

strategy is an effective factor that fostering reading comprehension among readers (Salataki &

Akyel, 2002).

The present study is an attempt to find out whether meta-cognitive reading strategy

awareness enhances students’ reading comprehension. Furthermore, it attempts to detect the

relationship between metacognitive reading strategy awareness and reading comprehension..