The Effect of Metacognitive Strategy in Reading Expository Text

The Effect of Metacognitive Strategy in Reading Expository Text - Reading is an important verbal skill that needs to be accomplished by students so that they can explore knowledge thoroughly. In the process of reading a text, a reader has to understand the content, information, explanation or facts intended to be delivered by the author. In another words, the reading process can be complex because readers would have to involve the quality of thought for the purpose of understanding the text. Without understanding the text that has been read, the reader will not be considered to have mastered the reading skill (Korabiak & Mete, 2004). This is because reading and understanding are constructive processes that support one another (Yahya & Ghazali, 2010). For an effective reader, the capacity of understanding a text is seen as important even in primary school.

The metacognitive strategy is not something new in the education field. According to Eilers and Pinkley (2006), this strategy is applied and taught to students to enhance the understanding of a text that has been read. The application of the metacognitive strategy during reading and comprehension lessons is also believed to help students to think methodically in all three levels of reading processes, namely before reading, during reading and after reading (Boulware-Gooden et al., 2007).

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Constructivist theory of metacognitive strategy

in reading lessons using metacognitive strategies, students are seen to involve actively. Students involvement in using metacognitive strategies to understand texts has turned them into a more motivated and high confidence readers (Wigfield et al., 2008). Students also appear to enjoy activities like discussions with friends and flash back of reading material contents according to individual understandings. This activity can encourage them to interact with friends and teachers based on the reading materials that instantaneously can enhance understanding on the texts. Besides, these activities give opportunity for students to learn from one another in explaining their understanding.

In short, reading lessons using metacognitive strategies give very good effects towards student’s understanding. The exposure among primary school students can be very suitable to train students to understand the text that they are reading more meaningfully (Jafari & Ketabi, 2012; Karami & Hashemian, 2012). This study concluded that reading lesson using the metacognition strategy can help to enchance students with moderate level of understanding on expository texts to understand better and more effectively compared to conventional approach.

Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education

Correspondence: Yahya Othman, Faculty of Education, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 UKM Bangi,

Selangor, Malaysia. Tel: 603-8921-6231. E-mail: yahya.othman@ukm.edu.my

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ies.v7n13p102