Strategies and Metacognitive Skills Ⅰ
1. What is "strategy"? How is it different from skills?
1. What is "strategy"? How is it different from skills?
There are several differences between strategy and skills. First, strategy is more conscious and deliberate focus, whereas skills are relatively unconscious concentration. Therefore, you may use your reading skills in the absence of being aware of what you actually do. On the other hand, you would choose certain reading strategies intentionally in order to answer the question that needs specific ones.
Can both strategy and skills change into the other thing? Researchers believe that it's possible if a learner makes use of a skill intentionally. Likewise, strategies become more effective and advanced developmentally when being used automatically.
2. Discuss the reading comprehension strategies. What are they? Summarize them based on Table 5.1.
One of the well-known classification of reading comprehension strategies is devised by Paris et al(1996). they divided a bunch of comprehension strategies into big three groups according to when readers use them; pre-reading strategies, while-reading strategies, and post-reading strategies. Then they listed each eleven subskills under those three criteria.
First, for pre-reading activity, learners may establish a good physical environment such as light, where they read. Also, they can set up reading purposes such as getting information and criticizing reading. There are other strategies of pre-reading; accessing prior knowledge, asking questions about the text, making semantic map, imagining the genre, structure, contents based on headings, pictures, and title. All the pre-reading activities facilitate learners' understanding.
Now, they are going into the text. with or without much prior knowledge and prediction, readers start reading text. they sometimes check their comprehension solving some questions throughout the reading, identify main idea, infer hidden meaning. Besides, they would try to make a big picture by recognizing text structure, predicting the main idea of each paragraph. On the other hand, looking for discourse markers, vocabulary, and glosses are more detailed way. The following is other while-reading strategies; comparing what is read with what is know, evaluating value of what is being learned, deciding which part learners should reread or just skip.
After finishing reading, readers might do some activities to check their comprehension again revisiting text. Reviewing notes, glosses, text markings, information also works well in post-reading strategies. learners would connect their own experience to reading and search for more information beyond the text. The stage plays a significant role because readers make their own appreciation of text, integrate information, and critiques. More active readers are likely to extend the text information with other sources such as experience, other books, and web sites.
3. What is metacognitive knowledge or skills on your own word and give an example in reading.
Metacognitive knowledge is the knowledge on how you make use of your own cognitive system in reading. Being aware of your cognition means that you catch downside as well as upside of it. The information is the key to successful reading due to the fact that readers can modify their weaknesses based on this kind of knowledge. Metacognitive knowledge has three different categories; knowledge of persons, tasks, and strategies. knowledge of persons help readers to understand their characteristics affect language processing. Regarding the second one, readers might understand what skills work well for the reading tasks. The final one is of what process readers have and how they make up for their weak points.
Metacognitive skills are in more practical and actual area than metacognitive knowledge. They are what readers do to understand what process is going on in their mind. Understanding, analyzing, monitoring, and revising cognitive process are all of metacognition. Also, for the reading task, readers may allocate attention, separate important part from less significant text. In other word, metacognitive skills are adopted to control whole cognitive process.
For instance, when I have to read the chapter 5, strategies and metacognitive skills in the textbook, I first thought of my reading strategies and metacognitive skils. I'm usually good at understanding short scientific text, but not good at doing longer reading that needs more mental energy. Also, I'm the person who prefer catching the whole picture to choosing bottom-up skill. So, I decided to split this long chapter and read certain pages a day. Before reading, I quickly skimmed the introduction because I usually figure out the difficult contents without missing introduction as prior knowledge. Then I wrote down big titles and sub titles not to miss the text flow. During reading, I continued to decide which part is essential and unimportant. Whenever I finish each big part, I also recall the flow as much as I can.
