An Analysis of Prospective Turkish Teachers' Metacognitive Reading Strategy Use

Abstract

This study aims to determine the types and frequency of metacognitive reading strategies used by high-achieving and underachieving students. The participants of the research comprised ten students studying at the Turkish-Language Teaching (TLT) department at Istanbul University, of whom five were high achieving and five were underachieving. The paper uses the think-aloud protocol in order to achieve a descriptive result. The participants were asked first to articulate the mental processes they used as they read a narrative text. After they finished reading the text, participants were asked how they understood the text, what problems they encountered as they read the text, and how they handled these problems. The results showed that participants used monitoring and regulation strategies the most. The total frequency of metacognitive reading strategies used while reading the story was 253 in high-achieving students and 122 in underachieving.