The Predictive Power of Linguistic Awareness and Cognitive Strategies

This study explores whether vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness and metacognitive awareness reading strategies are strong predictors of reading comprehension. It also addresses the relationship among vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness, metacognitive awareness and reading comprehension achievement.100 participants were selected randomly from a population of 250 11th grade students. The participants were asked to respond to MARSQ and researcher-made test of vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness,and RC. Pearson product moment correlation and stepwise multiple regression analysis were used. The result of the correlation analysis showed , vocabulary knowledge is highly correlated with reading comprehension; there is strong positive correlation between VK and SA; the same high correlation holds for the relationship between syntactic and reading comprehension, but there were no significant correlation with MARS. The stepwise multiple regression analysis results also revealed that EFL students' vocabulary knowledge plays a significant role in predicting their reading comprehension achievement, compared to syntactic awareness and metacognitive awareness reading strategies.