Abstract:

Reading and comprehending texts are challenging for students in higher education, especially when reading in English as a foreign language. An important component of efficient reading comprehension is the ability to accurately self-monitor understanding and performance. In this study we ask whether students can improve their comprehension monitoring through training and feedback on calibration and if so, can such improvement be generalized across languages? 138 undergraduates were divided into 4 study groups according to training language and type of training. Students attended five study sessions and a sixth, long-term follow-up session.

Results demonstrated that students who trained in the foreign language and received feedback, improved their monitoring, but this improvement was not generalized to the native language. Additionally, feedback resulted in improvement only in the foreign language, most likely because reading and comprehending in a foreign language is more challenging than in the native language, which led students to apply more cognitive resources and better focus their attention to the feedback. Most importantly is the finding that monitoring skills can be trained and improved by direct feedback in every language taught. Further, materials should be carefully selected such that they are difficult enough to allow an optimal environment for comprehension monitoring processes to develop.

Keywords:

Comprehension monitoring, calibration feedback, foreign language, reading comprehension.