Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategy Use between Field-Dependent and Field-Independent EFL Learners

Abstract

This paper aimed to study the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies between field-dependent (FD)and field-independent (FI) Turkish EFL university students who are learning English as a foreign language. To this end, 270 students from Istanbul (Cerrahpasa) University were chosen.First, Group Embedded Figure Test was used to appoint the participants into either FD or FI groups.After this, participants’ metacognitive awareness of reading strategy was assessed by using MARSI-R (Metacognitive Awareness of reading Strategies Inventory-Revised). Recently revised by Mokhtari et al., the MARSI-R instrument contains 15 items and measures three large sets of strategies including: Global Reading Strategies (GRS), Problem-Solving Strategies (PSS) and Support Reading Strategies (SRS).The results showed that the students reported using the 3 categories of strategies almost at a high-frequency level and they were aware of their metacognitive strategies. And statistically significant difference was found between FI and FD students regarding their use of GRS and SRS, hence, the use of students’ metacognitive reading strategies was affected by their different FI/FD cognitive styles.