The Effect of Explicit Teaching of Online Metacognitive Strategies on EFL Learners' L2 Reading Comprehension

Abstract

With the rapid development of technology, online reading has become an important issue for research in the educational field (Anderson, 2008). This study reports on an investigation into the effect of explicit teaching of online metacognitive strategies on reading comprehension. To this end, the study was carried out on 30 male intermediate level EFL learners, who received 12 hours of instruction in a language center in Tonekabon, Iran. The participants were assigned into the experimental and control groups. Before giving the instruction, the Online Survey of Reading Strategies (OSORS) was administered in order to find out the online reading strategies used by EFL learners. Then, in the experimental group, the researcher explicitly taught online metacognitive strategies through modeling whereas the method used for the control group was implicit and lecture-based. A pre-test post-test design was followed and the data were collected through online reading tests. The results revealed that online reading comprehension by the experimental group improved significantly. The findings show that explicit teaching of online metacognitive strategies could be beneficial in EFL intermediate classes.