2.3. The awareness of reading strategy use
2.3.4. Previous studies on the awareness of reading strategy use
This sub-section reviews prior research on reading strategies awareness by Hassan (2003); Zhang & Wu (2009); Anastasiou & Griva (2009) and Malcolm (2009).
A study by Hassan (2003) was undertaken to investigate the relationship between metacognitive strategy awareness and reading ability in L1 and L2. The study involved 40 students from a secondary school in Malaysia. A metacognitive awareness questionnaire by Carrell (1989) was adapted to investigate the — students’
conceptualization of reading and also Pearson’s r correlation was employed to find out if there is a statistically significant relationship between reading ability and metacognitive awareness for L1 and L2. Along with Pearson’s correlation test the simple linear regression was run to investigate if metacognitive awareness influences reading ability. This test is considered to be the line of best fit since it provides more information and is able to identify relationship between dependent and independent variable more precise than a correlation. The findings from Pearson’s correlation and simplé linear regression test show that there is a significant relationship between metacognitive awareness and reading ability for both the L1 and L2. If students are aware of the array of strategies that they can use, they can learn to select the appropriate strategies that can help them in obtaining meaning from the text they are reading.
Zhang & Wu (2009) attempted to assess students’ metacognitive awareness of broader strategies. They conducted a research with 249 students at different levels (high, intermediate and low) at a senior high school in China. Students were invited to respond to a questionnaire adapted from the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) by Mokhtari and Sheorey (2002) that comprises 30 items measuring three broad categories of reading strategies: global strategies, problem-solving strategies and support strategies. The findings of the research revealed that students who were conscious of their cognitive process during reading and were able to utilize a wide range of reading strategies especially global strategies were found to be correlated with higher English achievements. And, also Zhang & Wu came to conclusion that readers with strong awareness of reading strategy use may display hints to interpret a reading task.
Malcolm (2009) carried out a study with the aim to investigate the awareness and the differences in using reading strategies among students of specialized fields such as
medicine but expected to achieve high standard of English reading proficiency.
Therefore, the subjects of the study are 160 students from a variety of countries in the Arab Gulf region with the majority from Bahrain, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. All of them studied at a medical university in Bahrain and were divided into two groups including 108 students in the first year and 52 students in year four. In order to assess the students’ awareness of reading strategy and the differences in using academic reading strategies among students the study adapted the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) by Shoerey & Mokhari (2001) which consists of 30 individual strategies of three groups (metacognitive, cognitive and support). The results of the study revealed that there are some differences in using strategies in reading between students in year one and students in year four. For example, students in year one tend to use cognitive strategies such as re-reading or using prior knowledge more than students in year four who like to use metacognitive strategies such as using text features or skimming. However, the study asserted that although the differences of using reading strategies were found in two groups, the most important that the students can be aware of using strategies in reading. And, increased awareness of reading strategy use may be a characteristic of academically advanced students in general, whether reading in L1 or L2 (Malcom, 2009).
Another research on students’ awareness of reading strategies is the one by Anastasiou
& Griva (2009). The two researchers carried out a study with thirty six students from a primary school in Northern Greece in order to explore students’ awareness of reading strategies and to identify possible differences between poor and good readers, in terms of frequency and efficiency. The reading strategies that the study focused on are metacognitive and cognitive strategies. Thirty six students including eighteen poor readers (10 boys and 8 girls) and cighteen good readers (10 boys and 8 girls) were invited to a retrospective interview after they had finished a reading test. The findings of the study showed that there is a difference in metacognitive strategy use between readers of varying reading levels. Good readers are more aware of the strategies they use and more able to monitor their comprehension than less efficient readers are. More important, the study revealed moderate intercorrelations among cognitive strategy awareness, metacognitive strategy awareness and reading comprehension. In addition, the regression analyses of the study showed that cognitive strategy awareness, metacognitive strategy awareness explained 7.7% and 8.1% each of the variance in
reading comprehension while reading accuracy and reading fluency explained 35% of the variance. Thus, the two researchers come to conclusion that both cognitive and metacognitive strategy awareness can be considered to play a unique role in reading comprehension of that primary school students.
In summary, a detailed literature review of previous studies on the awareness of reading strategy use has been provided. The following comments focus on issues relating to subject selection, contexts, data collection methods and results.
With respect to subject selection, some generalizations can be made. First, it can be seen that most of studies have been conducted with students at primary or secondary levels but tertiary level except for the research by Malcom (2009). Second, they are from different languages (L1 & L2) as the studies by Hassan (2003) and Malcom (2009).
Third, they were grouped under poor and good reade s the study by Anastasiou &
Griva (2009) or under low-, intermediate-, high-proficiency students (e.g., Zhang &
Wu, 2009).
In term of the contexts of study, the researcher found out that most of the studies so far have been conducted in contexts other than Vietnam and according to Chamot (2005), Cohen (1998) and Zhang (2008) the contexts of the learning situation may have a strong influence on learners’ choice of language learning strategies. Therefore, the present study attempts to fill the gap by investigating the awareness of reading strategy used by students from a university in Vietnam aiming at exploring how students are aware of reading strategies and whether students’ awareness of strategy can affect their reading comprehension.
As to data collection techniques, students’ awareness of reading strategy use in the previous studies was examined through a variety of techniques such as: interviews or questionnaires. The following therefore discusses about the strength and limitations of that techniques.
In Hassan’s (2003) study, the questionnaire by Carrell (1989) was adapted as the main instrument to collect data. Although Hassan (2003) commented that Carrell’s questionnaire was very comprehensive, he admitted that some strategies in the questionnaire were not familiar with students and may also be difficult to remember.
This was explained by Chamot (2004) that students may not remember the strategies
they have used in the past, may claim to use strategies they do not use, or may not understand some strategy descriptions in the questionnaire items. A general strategy questionnaire like the one by Carrell (1989) would, thus, not be consistent with the present study.
Zhang & Wu (2009) used interview to investigate students’ awareness of reading strategy use in their study. Compared to other verbal reports such as think-aloud report, interview provides more generalizable information than does the concurrent think-aloud technique corresponding more to the awareness concept (Wesche, & Paribakht, 2000).
Moreover, this method has a number of strengths, one of which is that the interviews, as off-line reports do not interfere with the normal process of reading, as the online think- aloud reports do (Morrison, 1996; Camps, 2003). Second, “it allows questioning to be guided as you want it and you can clarify points that need to be made clearer much more easily than in something like a questionnaire” (Frey & Oishi, 1995, p. 3). Another advantage and also the very important strength of interview is that it is better tool to explore learners’ awareness as it get closer than other tools to what learners actually do
(Leow, 2000).
As can be seen from the above review of previous studies, the Survey of Reading Strategies was employed successfully by Zhang & Wu (2009) and Malcom (2009) and the findings from SORS in two studies were also consistent with each other.
Researchers highly appreciated SORS in attempts to investigate the awareness of reading strategy use for the following reasons. Firstly, it has been so far a unique instrument measuring ESL students’ awareness of reading strategies. In fact, there are several instruments aiming at measuring native English speakers’ awareness of reading processes, however, we could not found any published instruments that are specifically designed to assess ESL students’ awareness of reading strategies while reading for academic purposes Mokhtari & Sheorey (2002). SORS, thus, has been considered as an effective instrument for ESL students up to now. Secondly, it presented as a simple, yet effective tool for not only measuring students’ awareness but also for analyzing data (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002). Compared to other instruments, the data collected from think-aloud and retrospective interview as the case of Anastasiou & Griva (2009) for example are difficult in analyzing because of the amount of data and the interpretation of that data may be subjective (Lazaraton, 1995), while SORS is quite easy for analyzing and especially it even can be scored by students themselves (Mokhtari &
Sheorey, 2002). Thirdly, SORS is also the strong research supporting the positive link between students’ awareness of their own reading process and strategies and their reading performance (Carrel, 1991; Alderson, 1991). Compared to the questionnaire by Carrell (1989), the strategy items in SORS are familiar and quite easy to understand to most of students (Lawrence, 2007). In addition, it not only enables students to develop a better awareness of their reading strategies but also helps teachers assess such awareness. It therefore makes both teachers and students become more reflective (Lawrence, 2007; Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002).
With regard to findings, it can be generalized from previous studies as follow:
To begin with, most of the studies have revealed the significant differences in strategy use among different groups of students ranging from low proficiency students and high proficiency students. Accordingly, students at high proficiency level are more aware of strategies and can be able to adjust and monitor the strategies they use during reading process than students at low proficiency level. For example, Anastasious & Griva (2009) found that good readers reported that they employ strategies more frequently than poor readers and they can understand how to use them in different contexts such as when they lose concentration they use “paying attention” and “repetition” or when the
text became difficult they use “problem identification” to detect the hint information to resolve them.
Next, all of the prior research has found some interesting findings, however, some of them have not assessed students’ awareness of comprehensive categories of strategies.
The studies by Hassan (2003) and Anastasious & Griva (2009) were examples. In his study, Hassan only examined students’ awareness of metacognitive strategies but cognitive strategies. Anastasiou and Griva although made up for the lack of Hassan (2003) by examining both metacognitive and cognitive strategies, ignored support strategies. According to Sheila (1999) it should be evaluated the students’ awareness of broader strategies since the most effective outcomes are received by students when they actively combine such strategies together.
What is more, all studies although have found the significant differences in strategy use among students, have not assessed the relationship between students’ awareness of strategy use and their reading comprehension. For example, the studies by Malcom
(2009) and Zhang & Wu (2009) have ended up with investigating students’ awareness of reading strategy use without assessing the relationship between the awareness of reading strategies and reading comprehension. While the research by Hassan (2003) and Anastasious & Griva (2009) to some extent have found that there might be a relation between. students’ awareness of reading strategy use and their reading comprehension, however, they have not indicated the nature of that relationship (Poole, 2010).
To sum up, the review of prior studies in terms of subject selection, contexts, data
“collection and findings revealed some gaps of those studies that encouraged the researcher to conduct the current study to fill up with. First, the current study tries to investigate the awareness of broader strategies among students in a university in Vietnam, that is, the students from FSD at HANU. Second, the study also tries to assess whether students’ awareness of strategy use affect their reading comprehension. Third, as to data collection, the discussion of the advantages of the interview and the Survey of Reading Strategies by Mokhtari & Sheorey (2002) has provided the suggestion for the researcher to combine the two techniques to collect data for the present study.