VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY –HOCHIMINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES & HUMANITIES FACULTY OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS & LITERATURE THE EFFECT AND STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION OF METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES ON THEIR READING COMPREHENSION AT VUS ENGLISH CENTER A minor thesis submitted to the Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature in partial fulfillment of the Master’s degree in TESOL By TO MINH DAO Supervised by PHAM VU PHI HO, ASSOC. HO CHI MINH CITY, AUGUST 2022 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my appreciation for the assistance I received from a lot of people while working on the research paper. First and foremost, I would like to show my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Pham Vu Phi Ho, Assoc. for his valuable guidance, critical feedback and enormous encouragement, without which my thesis would be far from completion.
Secondly, I’m deeply grateful to all the professors of the Faculty of English Linguistics & Literature at Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences & Humanities for valuable knowledge, and advice during the years of studying. Thirdly, I would like to thank all the participants at VUS center for their engagement and beneficial information. Finally, millions of thanks to my colleges at VUS center and Dien Hong high school, friends from Ho Chi Minh City University of Social Sciences & Humanities, my beloved family who helped and encouraged me a lot when I was conducting the research. Ho Chi Minh City, July, 2022 To Minh Dao i ATTESTATION I declare that “The effect and students’ perception of metacognitive strategies on their reading comprehension at VUS English center” is my own work and that all the resources that I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references.
This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other institution. Ho Chi Minh City, July, 2022 To Minh Dao ii RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS I hereby state that I, To Minh Dao, being the candidate for the degree of Master of TESOL, accept the requirements of the University relating to the retention and use of Master’s Theses deposited in the Library. In terms of these conditions, I agree that the original of my thesis deposited in the Library should be accessible for the purposes of study and research, in accordance with the normal conditions established by the Library for the care, loan or reproduction of theses. Ho Chi Minh City, July, 2022 To Minh Dao iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.
ii RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iv LIST OF ABBREVIATION. vii LIST OF TABLES.
viii LIST OF FIGURES. Background to the study. Statement of the problems. Aims of the study.
Research questions and hypotheses. Significance of the study. Scope of the study. Outline of the thesis.
5 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW.1 Definition of key terms. Definition of reading comprehension .2 Reading comprehension types. Cognition and cognitive strategies. Metacognition and metacognitive strategies.
Teaching metacognitive strategies. Metacognitive strategies for teaching. Think-aloud strategy. SIOP lesson plan.
Theoretical model of teaching metacognitive strategies. The review of previous research. Research with training program. Research without training program.
Synthesizing previous studies. Pre-test and post-test. Teaching material and procedure. Metacognitive strategies lesson plan for teaching reading comprehension.
Teaching procedure for both experimental group and control group. Data collection procedure. Data analysis procedure.35 CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. Analysis of the data.
The demographic information. Reading comprehension scores. Literal comprehension and inferential comprehension. Discussion of result.
The improvement of students reading comprehension after MS training. The improvement of literal comprehension and inferential comprehension after MS training. Adjustment on each reading strategy time allocation. Students still have difficulties while using MS.
Suggestions / Pedagogical implications. Limitation of the study. Recommendation for further study. 76 Appendix A Summary of MS Research with Training Program .76 Appendix B Summary of MS Research without Training Program .79 Appendix C Demographic Survey.82 Appendix D Lesson Plan for Control Group .84 Appendix E SIOP Lesson Plan for Experimental Group .88 Appendix F Pre-test for reading comprehension .93 Appendix G Post-test for reading comprehension .98 vi LIST OF ABBREVIATION CS Cognitive Strategies MA Metacognitive Awareness MAI Metacognitive Awareness Inventory MARSI Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategy Inventory MS Metacognitive Strategies EEF Education Endowment Education SIOP Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol SORS Survey of Reading Strategies CAIE Cambridge Assessment International Education MARSI Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Comprehension Inventory EFL English as Foreign Language TESOL Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages vii LIST OF TABLES Table 1 SIOP Lesson Plan.
15 Table 2 Description of TOEIC pre-test. 26 Table 3 Description of TOEIC post-test. 27 Table 4 MS lesson with SIOP format. 31 Table 5 Teaching timetable for experimental group and control group.
34 Table 6 Demographic information of partipants. 37 Table 7 Background experience of MS. 38 Table 8 Distribution of pre-test of both groups. 39 Table 9 The independent Samples T-Test of the pre-tests.
41 Table 10 The independent Samples T-Test of the post-tests. 42 Table 11 The paired Samples T-Test of experimental group. 44 Table 12 The paired Samples T-Test of control group. 44 Table 13 The paired Samples T-Test of control group for literal comprehension.
46 Table 14 The paired Samples T-Test of exeperimental group for literal comprehension. 46 Table 15 The paired Samples T-Test of control group for infernetial comprehension 47 Table 16 The paired Samples T-Test of control group for literal comprehension. 48 Table 17 The Independent Samples T-Test of literal comprehension before training 49 Table 18 The Independent Samples T-Test of literal comprehension after training. 50 Table 19 The Independent Samples T-Test of inferential comprehension before training.
51 Table 20 The Independent Samples T-Test of inferential comprehension after training. 52 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Components of Metacognition. 9 Figure 2 Think Aloud Strategy teaching steps. 14 Figure 3 Theoretical framework of the study.
22 Figure 4 Histogram of the experimental group’s pre-test. 40 Figure 5 Histogram of the control group’s pre-test. 40 ix ABSTRACT More and more studies have been conducted to investigate the effect of metacognitive strategies (MS) on reading comprehension with positive results. However, in Viet Nam, many researchers focused on exploring metacognitive awareness (MA), and little has been made with the application of MS.
This led to the need for more investigation on the effect of MS as well as learners’ perception of time allocation and difficulties during the learning process since the more we know about learners’ problems, the more effective lessons could be designed for their development. Forty-nine students were recruited to be participants of the study with the employment of Quasi-experimental design. Statistical analyses including Paired Samples T-test and Independent Samples T-test were utilized to assess if MS could increase learners’ reading comprehension. The result correlated with previous study when the experimental group had significant higher performance on the reading test than the control group, in terms of both literal comprehension and inferential comprehension.
Moreover, time for practice and assessment was suggested to be extended and some difficulties hindering students’ learning were identified such as lack of cognition knowledge, regulation knowledge, and motivation. Key words: metacognitive strategies, reading comprehension x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This chapter provides an overview view of the study by highlighting the importance of reading, especially reading comprehension, and its correlation with. Moreover, aims and the reasons underline the importance of this study are also presented, followed by the research questions and scope of the study. Background to the study Anderson (2002) stated that reading greatly contributes to the success of an English learner.
In particular, reading has been considered a fundamental skill to acquire a language since the more time language learners spend on reading, the more knowledge they get about how the language functions. However, it is the complicated process of reading that makes many learners difficult to be proficient readers (Grabe, 2002). Othman et al. (2014) emphasized the role of readers in reading process, in which they do not only focus on the reading process, but they have to plan before reading and assess themselves at the end of the process.
According to Alshehri (2018), the complication of reading process happens because of the attempt to get messages that writers imply in the text. Not every reader is good at reading comprehension. To develop reading competences, learners need to comprehend the reading process. It is not a simple process of using only knowledge of vocabulary and grammar to comprehend the text.
More than that, reading requires learners to use various skills and strategies from necessary ones which mainly focus on reading techniques such as skimming, scanning, inferences, etc. to monitoring and regulating strategies, which are MS. Moreover, reading comprehension achievement is in correlation with learners’ MS use. Therefore, using MS to increase learners’ reading comprehension has become an interesting topic for many researchers in which they have been proved to bring significant influence on the process and outcome of students’ learning.
(Boekaerts & Niemivirta, 2000; Bolitho 1 et al. Many studies on this topic have been conducted with different training methods. In some training programs, MS have been incorporated directly in teaching process without another tool for either explicit instruction or explicit teaching procedure model (Do, M. On the other hand, Huynh, T.
H (2020) conducted the training program with Cognitive Academic Learning Approach model as a way to deliver explicit instruction and Fan (2009) employed SIOP lesson plan to teach think-aloud, summarization, and text structure strategies. In order to contribute to the field of MS training, this paper looks into the effect of MS on students’ reading comprehension, by utilizing MS teaching model proposed by Education Endowment Foundation (EEF, 2019) and investigate learners’ perception of the application of MS in terms of time allocation and difficulties. Statement of the problems MS have gained much interest from many researchers all over the world. Several aspects have been investigated such as the effect of MS, learners’ awareness of MS, teacher perception of MS, etc.
In terms of investigating the effect of MS on reading comprehension, the positive interaction between MS and reading comprehension has been proved (Boekaerts & Niemivirta, 2000; Bolitho et al., 2003; DeGennaro, 2018; Eilam & Aharon, 2003; Fan, 2009). While some certain MS including think-aloud, reciprocal teaching, text-summarization, etc. were assessed by many researchers, some other studies applied all the MS suggested by Israel (2007) and Phakiti (2006). Although various ways of applying MS into the training have been used, there is a need for more investigation on measuring the effects of MS on reading comprehension with the application of MS teaching model.
In the context of Viet Nam, Huynh, T. H (2020) stated that little research has been conducted to investigate the effect of MS on reading comprehension. Many of them 2 focused on exploring learners’ MA rather than the application of MS into teaching reading (Do, M. L (2011) emphasized the necessity of carrying out research into problems preventing students from using MS effectively.
However, these studies explored learners’ difficulties without MS training. It is noteworthy mentioning that the difficulty exploration would be more valuable if learners were in the progress of MS training. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct more studies on implementing MS into teaching reading and investigating learners’ perception of MS such as difficulties and time allocation. Aims of the study The aims of the study are to investigate the effect and students’ perception of MS on their reading comprehension at VUS English center.