The effectiveness of metacognitive strategies in word recognition to improve reading comprehension of lower secondary ESL poor readers

<p>Throughout Malaysia, concern is growing among educators about the increasing number of poor readers of English in the secondary school and at tertiary level. It has been found that a large number of students do not know how to recognize an unfamiliar word during the reading process....

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jayanthi Karupan
Format: thesis
Language:eng
Published: 2005
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ir.upsi.edu.my/detailsg.php?det=11494
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Summary:<p>Throughout Malaysia, concern is growing among educators about the increasing number of poor readers of English in the secondary school and at tertiary level. It has been found that a large number of students do not know how to recognize an unfamiliar word during the reading process. Thus, this inability hinders the comprehension of the readers, and eventually, these poor readers lose interest to read materials in the second language (L2). This study examined the effective methods to improve the word recognition skill among the poor readers. This study actually replicates the research done by Spedding and Chan (1991, 1993, 1994) experimenting on the Ll learners in Australia. The samples in this study are learners of English Second Language(ESL). In this study the experimental group was taught to use metacognitive strategies of word identification. These subjects were trained to use the orthographic clues and context clues to recognize unfamiliar words which they encountered in their reading comprehension texts. The subjects in the control group were taught using the traditional methods of word recognition. Pretestand posttest were given to the subjects using three comprehension texts. The results showed that the experimental group benefited from the training with significant improvement in their use of metacognitive strategies in word recognition of unknown words. Nevertheless, the control group too showed some improvement in their posttest scores. The paired samples t-tests revealed that there is a significant difference within the was experimental group's score in their posttest, after the training period. However, it found that there was no significant difference between the groups' scores in the pretest as well as the posttest using the statistical independent samples t-test. The findings from the to use context clues to questionnaire revealed that the lower secondary poor readers prefer identify unknown words during reading comprehension.</p>