The effect of Metacognition and Genre Awareness on Academic Reading Ability of EFL Students

The ability to comprehend a text is not only influenced by linguistic/formal knowledge, but also by genre knowledge. Therefore, major reading difficulties most students encounter are believed to arise out of deficiencies in the two knowledge types mentioned above. In a second/foreign language setting, a good reading competence is a vital necessity for those studying English for academic purposes and many curricula, therefore, devote many hours of instruction to reading lessons. Yet, despite years of instruction and practice in reading, many EFL students still have great difficulties in making sense of the texts they are required to read. They also seem to read more slowly than they read in their first language, and feel less confident about reading in English. As one probable solution, in this study it is suggested that in academic reading instruction, students would stand a better chance to improve their academic reading performance if their academic reading syllabi are enriched with tasks aiming to familiarize the learners with metacognitive strategies and generic features. In fact, based on the results achieved in various studies carried out so far, there seems to be a significant relationship between the EFL students metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, genre awareness, and their academic reading performance. This study has reviewed the results of the studies whose results corroborate the claim made by the authors .