Journal of Educational Sciences > Volume 11, No. 1, 1999

Metacognitive Consciousness and Reading Comprehension / Ali Saleh Al-Khabti

This study investigates the comprehension monitoring process of native Arabic speaking readers who read one Arabic passage and one English passage. Thirty-two third grade secondary school students were the subjects of the study. Fourteen students were classified as proficient readers and 18 were classified as less proficient readers. Their think-aloud protocols were tape recorded and marked by two Arabic language and English language teachers who were trained by the researcher for this purpose. The discussion of the comprehension monitoring process included two language-based problems - one consisted of looking for the referent of a pronoun, and the other consisted of difficult vocabulary. The think aloud protocol's three phases and six steps were defined as: the evaluation phase (problem recognition, finding the source of the problem), the action phase (forming a strategic plan, attempting a solution), and the checking phase (checking and revising solutions). The results showed that proficient readers could carry out the process successfully, while less proficient readers could not. This indicated that successful monitoring was correlated with reading proficiency, not language proficiency. The subjects were able to monitor the vocabulary problems better than the referent problems. Proficient readers acted similarly in both the Arabic and the English passages, as did less proficient readers. Proficient readers performed in the English passage better than in the Arabic passage in the final phase (checking and revising solutions).