METACOGNITIVE ONLINE READING STRATEGIES APPLIED BY EFL STUDENTS

Grsev NCEAY
School of Foreign Languages, Yeditepe University, Istanbul

Introduction
Changing nature of literacy in the age of technology ICTs; new means of communication, information retrieval, transaction processing, and problem solving (Friedman, 2005). New literacies (Leu , 2007, Pookcharoen, 2009) - new strategies and dispositions - new social practices 6/13/2012 2

Online reading vs. Traditional reading

Every proficient offline reader is not necessarily a proficient online reader (Coiro & Dobler, 2007; Henry, 2006) Each require different strategies Traditional reading strategies will not be sufficient to comprehend online information.
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 Online reading comprehension is defined with five major strategies: (1) identifying important questions; (2) locating information; (3) analyzing information; (4) synthesizing information; and (5) communicating information (Leu et al., 2007).

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Online Reading Strategies

knowing how to use a search engine to locate information; reading search engine results; reading a Web page to locate information that might be present there; making an inference about where information is located by selecting a link at one site to find information at another site.
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 knowing what to look for and how to access task-relevant information on the (Bilal, 2000; Nachmias & Gilad, 2002). Coiro (2007) has found at least five different types of evaluation strategies that occur during online reading comprehension: (1) evaluating understanding; (2) evaluating relevancy; (3) evaluating accuracy; (4) evaluating reliability; (5) evaluating bias.
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 Ones ability to control his or her cognitive processes which allows learners to use cognitive strategies to accomplish their academic goals (OMalley & Chamot, 1990) It assists learners in deciding on how to do a particular task Thus, metacognitively aware readers are more conscious of their own reading processes.
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Metacognition and Reading Comprehension

 Online reading comprehension processing requires strategies such as developing important questions, locating, critically analyzing, synthesizing and communicating information (Leu et al., 2004). Hence, some studies were conducted on the nature of metacognitive strategies during online reading processes (Anderson, 2003; Coiro and Dobler, 2007; Huang et al., 2009, Hamdan, 2010).
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The study
23 preparatory program students enrolled in the ELT and the English Literature department at a foundation university in Istanbul participated in OSORS. Age range; 18 and 21 2 volunteer students entered think-aloud. Average internet use reported by the participants is 2 hours per day.
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Purpose of the study

1) To investigate what metacognitive online reading strategies the surveyed students report using for academic purposes; 2) to discover how they use the reported strategies in actual online reading tasks.

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More specifically;
Research Question Data Source Data Analysis Descriptive statistical analysis 1. What metacognitive Online survey of reading online reading strategies do strtegies (OSORS) the participants report (Pookcharoen, 2009) using when reading online?

2. What metacognitive strategies do the students employ while undertaking online reading tasks?

Think-aloud protocols Post-reading interviews

Content analysis of the transcripts

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OSORS
39 items on a 5 likert-scale (never-always) global reading strategies (17 items) (0.77) Ex: I have a purpose in mind when I read online. problem solving strategies (12 items) (0.64), Ex: I try to get back on track when I lose concentration. and support reading strategies (10 items) (0.69) Ex: I go back and forth in the online text to find relationships
among ideas in it.

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Think-aloud protocols
a scale to find out the topic that the students were mostly interested (e.g., family, sports, insomnia). insomnia was appeared to be the mostly interested topic (26%). (1) Choosing Foods to Help You Sleep
http://nutrition.about.com/od/foodfun/a/foodsandsleep.htm

(2) Gotta Catch Some Zzzs!

http://depression.about.com/od/sleep/a/insomnia.htm
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 level of difficulty of the online reading texts was calculated based on the Flesch Reading Ease Test (73-77; fairly easy- intermediate)

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 BB Flashback Professional recording software. a capture program that records activity from the screen and audio from the microphone into video files. highlights the cursor path during a recording session, automatically pan, and record with sound. After each think-aloud session, video files were transcribed by the researcher. 6/13/2012 15

Student interviews
After the think-aloud sessions, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants. to collect some additional data in relation to the participants use of online metacognitive reading strategies while reading online

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Results
More Frequently
Category
Support Global Problem Global Problem

Less Frequently
Category
Support Problem Support Support Problem

Strategy
15. Using reference materials (4.35) 6. Scrolling through the text (4.26) 28. Rereading for better understanding (4.22) 27. Guessing what the content is about (4.17) 16. Paying closer attention to reading (4.09)

Strategy
7. Reading aloud when text is hard (2.65) 34. Evaluating text before using it (2.83) 12. Printing out a hardcopy of the text (2.87) 4. Taking notes while reading (3.00) 17. Clicking on links to other sites (3.04)

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 Even though the students generally find it time consuming and difficult to look up a dictionary during printed reading, students doing online reading mostly preferred using reference materials. While reading online for academic purposes, the participants seldom took notes (item 4) or printed out a hard copy of text (item12).

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Think-aloud-1
Started with scrolling through the whole text to get the gist of it and looked at the length and organization, then proceeded to read the comprehension questions (items 6 and 10). I will leave the word meaning questions to end, I need to understand the general idea firstly. I will read the whole text without stopping. (items14 and 33).
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 While reading to answer the questions, he sometimes stopped to look at the pictures (item18) and clicked on the annotations. If there is an annotation or a picture, that website can help me understand better and I can reach new information (item 17). When he was answering word meaning questions he directly opened an online dictionary. (Items 37 and 15).
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To sum up;
both students used four of the most frequently used five strategies reported in the OSORS. However, neither of the participants used no 27 (Trying to guess the content).

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 Other observed strategies include strategies no, 8 (Analyzing if the content fits purpose), 10 (Noting length and organization), 14 (Deciding what to read closely) , 18 (Using tables, figures, and pictures) which are all Global Reading Strategies.

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 Under the Problem-solving strategies category strategies no, 19 (Stopping and thinking about reading), 31 (Guessing meaning of unknown words), 33 (Skipping difficult words or sections) and 34 (Evaluating text before using it). Strategy no 21 (Paraphrasing for better understanding) was also employed by the participants as the support reading strategies.
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Discussion
The findings of this study are consistent with the Leu et al.s (1990) study which concludes that online reading comprehension processing requires strategies such as developing questions, critically analyzing, synthesizing and communicating information.

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 Some parallel results with the study of Coiro and Dobler (2007) in which they reported online reading requires prior knowledge sources such as knowing how to find a specific word within a text or using reference materials

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 The participants reported using global reading strategies the most. This specific result contradicts with the result of the study conducted by Huang et al. (2009) which reported that the use of support strategies dominated the strategy use and contributed to most of the comprehension gain.
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Implications
Since metacognitive strategies are believed to be responsible for regulating other strategies (OMalley and Chamot, 1990), teaching EFL students how to use these strategies effectively has a pivotal role in the reading classes for online reading purposes. Teachers need to update themselves and redesign their course syllabi by considering the online reading strategies 6/13/2012 27

Limitations
needs to be replicated with learners of other proficiency levels Small number of participants

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THANK YOU... gincecay@yeditepe.edu.tr

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