Innovation in Language Learning

This paper aimed to study the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies between field-dependent (FD)and field-independent (FI) Turkish EFL university students who are learning English as a foreign language. To this end, 270 students from Istanbul Cerrahpasa University were chosen. First, Group Embedded Figure Test was used to appoint the participants into either FD or FI groups. After this, participants’ metacognitive awareness of reading strategy was assessed by using MARSI-R (Metacognitive Awareness of reading Strategies Inventory-Revised). Recently revised by Mokhtari et al., the MARSI-R instrument contains 15 items and measures three large sets of strategies including: Global Reading Strategies (GRS), Problem-Solving Strategies (PSS) and Support Reading Strategies (SRS). According to the data analysis results, the students reported using the 3 categories of strategies at a high-frequency level. Both the main effect for strategies and the main effect for learners’ proficiency were significant. The high-proficiency group outperformed the intermediate group and the low-proficiency group in 2 categories of reading strategies: global and problem-solving; but no statistically significant difference was found among the 3 proficiency groups in using support strategies. Pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the changing Turkish society on online pandemic time.

Keywords: Metacognitive Awareness, Field-dependent, Field-Independent, Reading Strategy, MARSI-R.