Strategies and Metacognitive Skills

There has been no a clear cut between reading skill and reading strategies. Skills are assumed to be an automatic information-processing technique and it applies unconsciously. In contrast, strategies are conscious actions selected to achieve particular goal. When a reader does reading strategies, she applies the metacognitive mechanism which aims to the particular goals of problem solving.

Reading strategies focus on creating meaning and maintaining meaning by facilitating comprehension processing which can be achieved prior to, during, and after reading. Metacognitive skills in reading help a reading understand and regulate the performance of the task. It represents the planning, monitoring, and evaluating. Flavel subdivide metacognitive knowledge into knowledge about persons, task, and strategies. Knowledge of persons include knowledge a reader has about how people operate cognitively, while knowledge of tasks involves being familiar with a new information and awareness of a certain task required. Knowledge of strategies involves knowing strategies for monitoring an individual’s cognitive progress and how to remedy comprehension failures. The researches have proved that there were no differences of strategies which were used by good readers and poor readers. However, they were different at the level of success. Further, each individual employs different strategies. Nevertheless, successful readers use more reading strategies than less successful readers. Thus, direct training of strategies and metacognitive skills which provide many exercises is useful for readers to gain success in making and maintaining meaning to bring comprehension.