Abstract:

Many Spanish universities are offering their students the possibility of studying a degree in English so that they could later apply their knowledge and have better labour opportunities in the European market. Since Higher Education learning is mainly an autonomous process, developing good metacognitive reading strategies is necessary for university students, as well as having an adequate level of English proficiency. We present a descriptive and exploratory study about university students’ self-perceive use of metacognitive strategies while reading Science texts in English (L2) and in Spanish (L1). The sample was made up of 110 second-year university students (20-25 years old) from a Spanish Pre-Service Teacher Faculty. We used an external, objective measure of their metacognitive skills based on the Error Detection Paradigm (Baker,1979), and also a more subjective one, based on a well-known, self-administered instrument, the Metacognitive Awareness Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI; Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002). In a first session, we obtained the objective measure. Students were asked to read three short manipulated texts (210-240 words) about general science topics in each language. Each of them included 4 embedded errors. Students had to assess their comprehensibility for educational purposes. In a second session, students answered the MARSI for reading strategies in each language. Results showed that most students were over-confident about their use of metacognitive strategies when reading in English. Their answers in the MARSI for English and Spanish reading were very similar, but their performance in the objective task was quite different. Therefore, this kind of self-administered instruments to assess metacognitive skills development should be used with caution: answers by students having low metacognitive development could be non-accurate so providing wrong data to researchers.

Keywords:

Metacognitive Strategies, EFL, Science Texts, University Students.