The Effects of Attitude & Motivation on the Use of Cognitive & Metacognitive Strategies among Iranian EFL Undergraduate Readers

Abstract

Studies in reading strategies bring together the assumption that individual characteristics may influence reading performance; different readers may process the same text in different ways, depending on their purposes, motivation, attitudes, interests and background knowledge. The research aims to study the effect of motivation and attitude on the use of cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies among EFL undergraduate students who passed all reading comprehension modules. For this purpose, University of Ahvaz of Iran was chosen as a case study. 72 students have had this feature. Among these students, 51 homogenous students, based on their performance on Michigan Test of English Language Proficiency (2010) were selected to take part in this study to fill two questionnaires and took a reading. After checking the reliability and validity of the instruments, a normality parametric test was used to ensure normality distribution of data using SPSS 20 software. To analyze the data, t-test and Pearson correlation test were performed. The findings of the research pointed to the impact of EFL learners’ level of motivation and attitude, on their reading comprehension ability indicating a relatively high direct correlation (0.67). The results also revealed that the highly motivated students were in favor of using cognitive and metacognitive strategies more than less motivated ones. Overall, the finding suggests that learners' individual differences in terms of their motivation and attitude levels should be taken into account in their development of reading comprehension skills and reading strategy use.