The Impact of Teaching Procedural Metamemory Strategies on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Metamemory refers to a person s knowledge about the contents and regulation of memory. It plays an important role in planning, allocation of cognitive resources, strategy selection, comprehension monitoring, and evaluation of performance. These are two main structural components of metamemory-declarative knowledge, which enables a person to evaluate the contents of memory, and procedural knowledge, which enables a person to monitor and regulate memory performance. The concern of this study was to investigate whether teaching procedural metamemory strategies has any effect on reading comprehension of EFL learners. Sixty female intermediate Iranian EFL students, chosen from among 100 students based on their scores on an English proficiency test were randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group. In an instructional period, the experimental group received the treatment; that was instruction and practice on procedural metamemory strategies, and the control group received a placebo, that was a routine practice of reading comprehension. Finally the two groups performances on a reading comprehension posttest were compared using a t-test, the result of which revealed that the treatment had a significant effect on the learners reading comprehension. The proposed null hypothesis of the study was, thus, rejected