The Future of Education

This research is an attempt to investigate the Iranian university students’ use of reading strategies and their degree of performance on reading passages, also by considering the impact of some influential factors such as strategy awareness and English language proficiency and attitude and their components on strategy use. The sample of study consists of 100 university students attending the faculty of chemistry in Mazandaran university of Iran. Research data were obtained via a questionnaire of strategy use and awareness adopted by Phakiti’s Reading strategies questionnaire (2006), Yamashita’s reading attitude questionnaire (2004), a Nelson proficiency test, and a reading comprehension test. In this study, Pearson correlation, regression analysis, one-way ANOVA, Scheffe post-hoc multiple range Test for dependent variables were used. The results have indicated that there is a significant difference among three groups of high, mid and low in terms of their reading strategy use and reading performance (F = 68.194, p < .05), and high group outperformed other groups in reading passages. It was concluded that there is a positive correspondence between the students’ reading scores and degree of reading strategy use. In other words, the higher the reading scores, the more the use of reading strategies. Having established that L2 cognitive, affective, and linguistic domains have significant contributions on using reading strategies and also based on their interrelatedness, awareness have more impact on strategy use. Among the components, metacognitive awareness rather than cognitive, affective rather than cognition, and grammar rather than vocabulary predicts more the strategy use.