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Metacognition is defined as "the deliberate conscious control of one's own cognitive actions" during reading (Brown 1980, 453).1 It involves awareness of one's own understanding and nonunderstanding, and includes such processing skills as predicting, checking, and monitoring comprehension during reading (Fitzgerald). According to Baker and Brown, effective L1 "readers must have some awareness and control of the cognitive activities they engage in as they read" (354). In other words, readers must employ metacognitive skills if they hope to achieve successful comprehension of the text. Research on poor native readers of English, particularly children, indicate that they often fail actively to attend to the reading task and consequently fail to monitor their comprehension progress.2 They tend to view reading as a process of decoding individual words rather than a process of building a coherent conceptual representation of the text (Baker and Brown). Conversely, there is considerable evidence to show that children who do well in metacognitive tasks learn to read quickly and easily in their first language (Bialystok and Ryan). Baker and Brown identify some of the metacognitive skills involved in successful comprehension for L1 readers as: (a) being aware of the reading task, which includes: clarifying the purposes of reading, that is understanding both the explicit and implicit task demands; identifying the important aspects of the message; and focusing attention on the major content rather than on trivia; (b) monitoring comprehension, which includes: overseeing ongoing activities to determine whether comprehension is occurring and engaging in self-questioning to determine whether goals are being achieved; and (c) taking corrective action when failures in comprehension are detected. Research suggests that the active use of such metacognitive strategies can alert native readers to problem areas in a text and help them to overcome comprehension problems. At present very little is known about how metacognitive processing impacts second language reading, yet it is widely held that the same or similar metacognitive processing strategies that operate in L1 reading are also applicable to L2 reading (Bernhardt, 1991; Carrell; Hosenfeld; Neville). The purpose of this research is to identify and describe the metacognitive processing strategies utilized by nonnative readers of German as they read authentic German texts. For this study, metacognitive processing strategy is defined as evidence of conscious control over one's own reading comprehension and is characterized by the skills identified by Baker and Brown listed above as well as by such activities as summarizing and paraphrasing aspects of the text. |
