A Complete Review for Metacognitive, Cognitive, and Social/Affective Strategies as Essential Components of Learning strategies and their relationships with EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension Promotion

This study attempts to shed light on how learners' exact attention can be in line with learning meaningfully and bring about remarkable changes in the learning ability of upper-intermediate EFL learners through employing certain learning strategy items with the aim of enhancing reading scores and consequently injecting into learners a sense of satisfaction with their work. Additionally, this study aimed to investigate the relationship of metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies with EFL learners’ reading comprehension. To this end, the study employed a quasiexperimental design with a placement test as a proficiency test to find the homogeneity of groups. Each group received one main strategy and then, according to Oxford (1990) training model, the students were exposed to those strategies accompanied with reading comprehension texts. Learners’ progress and also the relationship of those strategies with reading comprehension were measured during the sixteen sessions of teaching and employing the strategies. Independent sample T-Test with Pearson correlations indicated that metacognitive group significantly outperformed the other groups, so metacognitive strategies were more in line with EFL learners’ reading comprehension.

Keywords: Learning strategy, Metacognitive, Cognitive, Social/Affective strategy, Reading comprehension