THE USE OF METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES FOR READING COMPREHENSION THROUGH THE COGNITIVE ACADEMIC LANGUAGE LEARNING APPROACH.

Abstract

The vast majority of Chilean students present some difficulties at the moment of reading and understanding a written text. There are some reasons to justify the problem, such as the lack of vocabulary and the lack of essential strategies to accomplish the reading tasks, which seem to have been ignored in the classroom for years. Because of this, this quasi-experimental mixed designed study attempts to discover the effects of the use of metacognitive strategies in the classroom on students’ reading comprehension. The study was carried out through the implementation of the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach, also known as CALLA, which was designed to provide academic language development to English Language Learners. The sample was taken from 2 different subsidized schools ―Sidney College‖ and ―Sebastian School‖, at high school level who were assessed on the effective use of these strategies through reading tests and oral interviews based on the approach mentioned before. The findings of our research proved that the hypothesis proposed was true: subjects improved their level of reading comprehension through the use of metacognitive strategies. This made contributions over the teaching-learning process for those, teachers and students, who are interested in working with metacognitive strategies to develop the reading skill or other subject areas.