The Relationship between Raising Metacognitive Awareness and English Reading Comprehension of Dutch Grade 11 Pre-University Students

Abstract

Academic research and curricular reforms are interested in the relationship between metacognitive awareness and English reading comprehension. More advanced readers can monitor their approach and switch between strategies to overcome reading comprehension challenges. This study aimed to investigate the association between raising metacognitive awareness in 15 Dutch grade 11 pre-university students with a control group of 17 students. It was investigated in the Dutch school system because the Netherlands has the greatest level of English proficiency out of 112 nations. Therefore, this study examined whether a higher proficiency translated to a significant relationship between their level of metacognitive awareness based on the MARSI-R and their performances on mini English reading comprehension tests before and after the intervention. Results demonstrated that for the small number of students metacognitive awareness increased in a positive and marginally statistically significant way. However, there was no correlation between this improvement and the quantity of exposure each student received from attending lessons and working with a self-evaluation instrument. Students’ English reading comprehension did not statistically improve either, even though most of the six students present during both intervention test sessions saw an improvement in their individual results. Raising their metacognitive awareness was not statistically significantly related to their English reading comprehension. However, there are a number of limitations in the procedure, particularly the data collection and missing cases in the dataset, which necessitate further study because the results of the current study do not accurately reflect the results of a sizable sample of students.