An An Investigation into the Correlation between Students’ Metacognitive Reading Strategy Use and Reading Performance in English

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between students’ metacognitive reading strategy use and reading performance in English. The participants of the study were 32 randomly selected summer scheme 2019 academic year undergraduate Sidama language and literature trainees who took several English language courses including reading skills courses. To collect the necessary data for the study, the researchers utilized Mokhtari and Sheorey’s (2002) Survey of Reading Strategies and a reading comprehension test. Hence, it is a correlational study. A Bivariate Pearson correlation was conducted to examine the degree and direction of association between the subjects’ use of reading strategy and their reading performance in English. Besides, means and standard deviations were computed to determine the level of applying the metacognitive strategies by the subjects. In both of the analyses, the researchers used the SPSS version 20. The findings showed that the participants are active users of all three types of reading strategies (global, problem-solving and support strategies) measured by the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), problem-solving strategies were the most preferred and support strategies the least preferred. Conversely, the Pearson correlation analysis results showed that there is no statistically significant relationship between the overall metacognitive reading strategy use and the total score of the student’s general reading test performance (r = 0.112, p = 0.585). It is, therefore, concluded that the students are high reading strategy users of all three types of reading strategies, but there is an insignificant correlation with their reading performance where this inconsistency may be partly attributed to unguided or unconscious usage of reading strategies. Keywords: metacognitive, reading strategies, reading performance, correlation