A Study on the Employment of Metacognitive Reading Strategies among University-Level Preparatory Class Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to find out how much the students are aware of the metacognitive reading strategies that can be applied while reading and whether there are any differences in the usage of these strategies in terms of gender, level at the university, and department in the high school. In this case, the research was descriptive in nature and used the general survey model. The study group of the research was made up of 474 students from the preparatory classes at a foundation university for the academic year of 2021–2022. This study sought to ascertain the degree to which students, who are students at the Department of Foreign Languages at a foundation university in Ankara, read academic literature using metacognitive reading strategies. To measure the degree of the usage of metacognitive reading strategies and determine if there were any connections between students' reading comprehension and the strategies, Metacognitive Reading Strategies Questionnaire (MRSQ), developed by Taraban, Rynearson, and Kerr (2004), was chosen as a tool to determine which metacognitive reading strategies students employ while they are reading. The MRSQ questionnaire was deemed to be appropriate for usage because it was translated into Turkish by Çöğmen and Saracaloğlu (2010) and after conducting validity and reliability tests it was proved to be appropriate to be used in the research. According to the data obtained from the questionnaire, a statistically significant difference was found in the students’ scores in terms of their genders and the high school departments they attended, but there was not a statistically significant difference in terms of their university grade levels. The research's findings may shed light on the reading strategies that students at the Department of Foreign Languages make use of when reading texts in English, academic papers, and school-related resources.