Explicit Instruction Does Affect the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies for EFL Readers

This study examines whether explicit reading strategy instruction has a significant effect in involving foreign language learners' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies when reading for academic purposes in English. Using MARSI (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002) and instrument designed to measure the metacognitive reading strategies as an assessment tool, 60 Korean EFL university students completed a pre-survey before instruction and a post-survey after instruction. The results reveal that 1) students reported higher frequency of usage of reading strategies in the post-survey than in the pre-survey, which indicates that explicit instruction does affect metacognitive awareness: 2) students reported that this approach induced a moderate to high level of strategy awareness with a significant preference for using Problem-Solving Strategies, followed by Support Strategies, and Global Reading Strategies; and 3) a positive correlation occurs between self-rated reading ability in English and reported usage of metacognitive reading strategies. The use of metacognitive reading strategies of Korean EFL learners is compared with that of native speakers and multilingual learners to identify the nature of EFL reading research.