The Effect of Explicit Instruction of Metacognitive Reading Strategies on ESP Reading Comprehension in Academic Settings

This study investigated the effect of explicit instruction of metacognitive reading strategies on ESP reading comprehension among university students in Iran. Strategy instruction has recently been integrated into language teaching methodologies, stressing that successful language learners take advantage of appropriate strategy selection and application in order to develop better language skills. Poor learners, on the other hand, fail to know how to use strategies and for what purposes. There has been ample research on the impact of explicit strategy instruction on the EFL learners’ language skills. These studies indicate the effectiveness of strategy instruction on the various aspects of language learning such as skill development among EFL learners but the notion of the effectiveness of strategy instruction on ESP reading comprehension in university level has not been much scrutinized in Iranian context. The participants in this study included undergraduate first and second year students studying Islamic Art and Architecture Engineering at Tabriz Islamic Art University. A randomized subjects and posttest-only control group design was employed in this study. The number of students in Art control and experimental groups was 28 and the one for Architecture control and experimental group was 26 students. The participants in the experimental groups received explicit instruction of metacognitive reading strategies through the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA) for strategy instruction. The results of independent t-test revealed that the students in the experimental groups outperformed those in the control groups and showed greater achievement in their ESP reading comprehension ability.