A Comparison of Highly Successful, Moderately Successful, and Unsuccessful TestTakers’ Performance on EFL Reading Comprehension Test Regarding Test Taking Strategies Use

Because of the crucial role of test taking strategies in the test taking process, this paper set out to investigate whether EFL test takers differ in using cognitive and metacognitive test taking strategies or not. In addition, the study aimed at finding how the test takers might differ in their performance on different aspects of reading comprehension test. To this end, 130 female EFL learners who ranged in age from 1921 were selected based on their availability to participate in the study. These university students were majoring in different fields of study including architecture, electronics, computer science, and hotel management. A reading comprehension test, a questionnaire, and a retrospective interview were the main instruments used to collect the data. The strategies of guessing, prior knowledge, translating, note taking, and underlining, as cognitive strategies and planning, selfmanagement, and monitoring as metacognitive strategies were focused in this study,. Analysis of the data indicated that there was not a significant difference between highly, moderately, and unsuccessful test takers in their use of cognitive and metacognitive test taking strategies. However, based on the results of this study, there was a significant difference in the performance of highly, moderately, and unsuccessful learners on different reading comprehension items. The highly successful test takers appeared to perform more effectively than the moderately and unsuccessful test takers in responding to the reading comprehension items including main idea, factual information, vocabulary, and reference