Gender Differences in Metacognitive Reading Strategy Use among English as a Foreign Language Students at Al-Balqa Applied University

Abstract

The current study aimed at exploring gender differences in the employment of metacognitive reading strategies by English as a foreign language students at Al-Balqa Applied University in an attempt to bridge the gap in this specific field of knowledge. The study relied on  a group of 86 participants (36 males=43% and 49 females= 56.9%) of different levels of proficiency and various academic fields of study. The participants completed the 30-item Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS)  developed by Mokhtari and Sheory (2002). The findings of the study revealed that the participants were high users of the overall metacognitive reading strategies with no significant gender differences in the strategies employed. Both males and females equally employed the same strategies with the same order of frequency, ranking problem solving as the most frequently used (M=3.8081), followed by support strategies (M=3.5393) and reporting global strategies to be the least preferred (M=3.5169). These results illustrated that EFL readers’ utilization of the reading strategies is due to reasons other than gender.

Keywords: Metacognitive, Reading Strategies, Support Strategies, Global Strategies, Problem Solving Strategies, English as a Foreign Language (EFL), gender, male, female.