The relationship between metacognitive strategy training and willingness to read in English among medical students

Abstract

Abstract<br><br>This quasi-experimental study examined the relationships among between students’ metacognitive awareness, and willingness to read English texts, and their reading comprehension ability. For this purposeSo, a model was proposed and was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) with R software. Participants included 98 medical students of two classes at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. One class was assigned as the control group and the other class was assigned as the experimental group. A census method was used for collecting the statistical units. At first, both groups were asked to complete the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (MAI; Schraw & Dennison, 1994) and the Willingness to Communicate in English questionnaire (WTC; MacIntyre, Baker, Clément, & Conrod, 2001). In theStudents of the experimental group, the teacher were provided the students with the metacognitive knowledge and some reading strategies, including reading for main ideas and reading for organization. At the end of the semester, all participants again completed the two questionnaires, and took a final examination achievement test. And finally, the scores of reading comprehension (RC) and cloze tests were considered as the observational variables for metacognitive awareness and willingness to read after the intervention. The proposed model demonstrated the significant effect at the level of 5% for metacognitive awareness before the intervention (MA1) on metacognitive awareness after the intervention (MA2), willingness to read before the intervention (WTR1) on willingness to read after the intervention (WTR2), and MA1 on WTR2. It also indicated a mutual significant effect of MA1 and WTR1, and also MA2 and WTR2. However, no significant effect of WTR1 on MA2 was observed. Also, in the experimental group, the metacognitive strategy training significantly affected MA2. Regarding reading comprehension ability, there was a significant relation between MA2 and RC tests' result. In addition, there was a significant relation between RC and cloze tests' results and WTR2. Thus, the proposed SEM model reached the appropriate fit thresholds for all of the indices. Finally, the expansion of this study can be applied to curriculum development with metacognitive strategy in EAP context, also taking measures to promote students’ willingness to read in English inside and outside the class. In this way, it will improve Iranian medical students’ special area reading comprehension so as to increase our competition with the world in medical sciences. Our study had limitations because it was limited to medical students, also the students of both groups were taught by different teachers.<br><br>Keywords: metacognitive awareness, willingness to read in English, reading strategy, structural equation modeling (SEM), R software