Exploring the factors that affect reading comprehension of EAP learners

Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12 (2013) 1–9

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Exploring the factors that affect reading comprehension of EAP learners Ays¸egül Nergis* School of English Language Instruction, Ozyegin University, 34794 Istanbul, Turkey

a b s t r a c t Keywords: Academic reading Syntactic awareness Metacognitive awareness Depth of vocabulary knowledge

As far as academic reading comprehension is concerned, a network of linguistic skills and strategies operate in a complex and integrated matter. Since it is impossible to examine all the factors affecting reading comprehension all at once, it is more reasonable to compare and contrast the predictive effects of specific variables against each other and elicit the role of each of them in determining academic performance. For this reason, the present study aims to investigate whether specifically the depth of vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness or metacognitive awareness was a more powerful predictor of academic reading comprehension. 45 students from the English Language Teaching Department in an English-medium foundation university in Turkey participated in the study. The results of multiple regression analysis revealed that with a sample of homogenous first language (L1) background learners, depth of vocabulary knowledge was not a strong predictor of academic reading comprehension for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students. However, it was found that syntactic awareness was a significant predictor of academic reading comprehension in second language (L2) and of the investigated variables, metacognitive reading strategies have much to contribute to academic reading comprehension. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction One of the most important skills that university students of English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) need to acquire is the ability to comprehend academic texts (Dreyer & Nel, 2003). The level of reading comprehension required for academic reading for university students is more complex than many other reading types and purposes. Students need to gain a large amount of vocabulary in L2 in order to decode the texts that are presented to them in teaching and testing situations (Koda, 2007; Urquhart & Weir, 1998). For good comprehension, they also should have adequate competence in L2 syntax (Williams, 2006: 358) and be able to consciously control processing and understanding, that is “metacognitive awareness” (Urquhart & Weir, 1998: 226). Koda (2007: 29) called for more research on L2 reading development which should address a) a multitude of reading components, b) dual-language development, c) learner varieties. However, to date, there has been little research conducted on L2 reading development that addressed these specified issues. There is also not enough research, especially in an L2 context, on “the direct effects of specific abilities on reading comprehension development” (Grabe, 2004: 60). Bernhardt (2005) also suggested that future research must deal with the relationship between multiple variables and literacy knowledge and second language proficiency. All these show that there is a need for more research looking into the relationship between reading comprehension and other related variables and their possible effects on comprehension in different cultures and especially with groups of different L1 background. * Tel.: þ90 216 564 90 00. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1475-1585/$ – see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2012.09.001

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In the light of the previous studies, this study attempts to investigate the role of several variables in academic reading comprehension. These variables are syntactic awareness, depth of vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive awareness. 2. Depth of vocabulary knowledge An extensive focus of investigation has been given by reading researchers to the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension (Clark & Ishida, 2005). This close connection between these two constructs could be interpreted either as vocabulary knowledge enables reading comprehension (Koda, 2007) or as the two are functionally interdependent, mutually affecting each other’s development (Grabe & Stoller, 1997: 119; Koda, 2005). Automatic recognition of a large vocabulary is necessary for interpreting the global meaning of the text because if the reader’s cognitive effort is directed at deciphering the information at sentence level, she or he should have difficulty in connecting paragraphs (Laufer, 1997: 23). Reading comprehension increases even more when readers have the knowledge of the vocabulary items in the text (Grabe & Stoller, 1997: 119); they can continue reading with confidence when they know that certain word meanings are correct (Grabe & Stoller, 1997: 112). In the literature on vocabulary knowledge, a basic differentiation has been called for between depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge (Nassaji, 2004; Read, 2000). This distinction is made according to how many words are known (vocabulary breadth) and how well the meanings are known (depth of vocabulary knowledge). In other words, as breadth of vocabulary knowledge refers to the size of vocabulary, the depth of vocabulary knowledge relates to “how well one knows a word” (Akbarian, 2010; Mukarto, 2005; Nassaji, 2004; Qian, 2002). Thus, depth of vocabulary knowledge should refer to not only knowing the meaning of the word but also “knowing its individual meanings in particular contexts” (Nassaji, 2004: 11), such as collocational meanings related to a specific word and semantic relationships with other words (Read, 2000). Many studies have shown the importance of depth of vocabulary knowledge in L2 reading performance. For example, Qian (2002) investigated whether the size and depth of vocabulary knowledge contributed better to predicting the performance on reading tasks for basic comprehension. 217 students attending to an intensive ESL program participated in the study. The author used three different measures for assessing vocabulary knowledge and concluded that although there was a high intercorrelation between these measures, the DVK (depth of vocabulary) measure developed by Read (1998, 2000) was clearly superior to other instruments in predicting reading comprehension. Akbarian (2010) also added further discussion to the literature asserting that there is a close relationship between size and depth of vocabulary knowledge for L2 readers and both of these knowledge types increases with the proficiency level in L2. The depth and quality of lexical knowledge was found also to be highly correlated with the degree and type of strategy use and success (Nassaji, 2004) and language proficiency (Golkar & Yamini, 2007). Nonetheless, in 2002 study, Moir and Nation found that adult ESL learners showed little interest in acquiring depth of word knowledge, indicating that adult L2 learners tended to be preoccupied mainly with fulfilling course requirements, ignoring the importance of deep word knowledge in L2. By doing so, they also failed to use their already acquired lexical items for communicative purposes (Moir & Nation, 2002: 23). Lin and Morrison (2010) also suggest that measuring only the size of vocabulary in EAP learners may not be sufficient to explore their full linguistic capacity. Instead, if it really has to be done, academic vocabulary size along with the depth of lexical knowledge should be examined in order to see whether EAP learners can successfully complete academic reading and writing tasks. This principle has been taken into consideration in the present study as well. 3. Syntactic awareness As syntax “carries with it the meaning of the relationships” between words and grammatical structures (Bernhardt, 1991: 79), syntactic awareness has a significant role in comprehension of a text. Syntactic awareness is strongly linked with L2 reading comprehension (Grabe, 2009; Van Gelderen et al., 2004). Reading in a non-native language, however, reduces the level of reading comprehension to a considerable degree (Walker et al., 2007). The disruptive power of syntactic difficulty can be easily observed in reading comprehension in L2 more often than in L1 (Koda, 2005). However, the function of syntax in the course of L2 reading development is not necessarily clear (Bernhardt, 2005). Many studies investigating the link between syntactic knowledge and L2 reading can be found in the literature. For example, vocabulary and grammar knowledge were found to have a strong relationship with syntactic awareness and reading comprehension (Cain, 2007). Comprehension abilities were also found to be strongly related to syntactic performances (Gaux & Gombert, 1999). Shiotsu and Weir (2007), in two studies conducted in different contexts, examined the significance of syntactic knowledge compared with vocabulary breadth in reading. The first study involved students from an EAP course in a UK university and the second one involved Japanese EFL learners from 3 different universities. Both studies made use of a criterion text reading comprehension measure to assess reading comprehension, a modified version of the Vocabulary Levels Test, which measures learners’ breadth of vocabulary knowledge and the Test of English for Educational Purposes, which is a multiple choice test for measuring knowledge of syntax in L2. These two studies revealed that syntactic knowledge played a superior role compared with vocabulary knowledge in determining success in reading comprehension in EAP context. However, studies investigating the role of syntactic knowledge in reading comprehension have mostly focused on young learners of ESL (Hagtvet, 2003; LeFrançois & Armand, 2003), or have incorporated L1 contexts only (Chik et al., 2012; Ho et al., 2012). There is a lack of studies on the relationship between syntactic knowledge and L2 reading; therefore, the effect of syntactic knowledge on L2 reading comprehension remains inconclusive (Shiotsu & Weir, 2007). Moreover, the greatest gap

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in the literature lies in the investigation of the role of syntactic knowledge in proficient adult learners’ reading performance in L2 (Morvay, 2009).

4. Metacognitive reading strategies Recent trends in second language reading research have emphasized the role of conscious use of strategies in reading comprehension (Malcolm, 2009; Sheorey & Mokhtari, 2001). The general tenor of metacognitive awareness studies is that conscious monitoring of the comprehension process is important for critical reading since metacognition is conducive to comprehension by helping readers to monitor their reading process and adjust their strategy use (Sheorey & Mokhtari, 2001; Wu, 2008). While studying academic texts in L2, EAP students found metacognitive strategies more significant (Malcolm, 2009). In addition to this, language learning experiences gained in formal settings were found to determine metalinguistic knowledge Roehr and Ganem-Gutierrez (2009). Indeed, advanced EAP learning experiences were consistently found to involve more frequent use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies possibly due to strategic training offered to students in these programs (Cogmen & Saracaloglu, 2009). In fact, according to Lau and Chan (2007), ESL students fail to gain awareness of and make use of appropriate reading strategies in academic reading tasks when they were not given clear instructions. However, there is a lack of research on the use of strategies by proficient EAP readers studying the relationship between metacognition and reading comprehension experienced in different social, cultural and linguistic contexts (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2004: 382).

5. Reading comprehension Comprehension has multiple definitions (Koda, 2005). It could be seen as a process versus a product; as a sum of parts versus a whole or having varying degrees (pp. 228–230). It is widely discussed that reading comprehension requires many supporting skills such as vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge, knowledge of grammar, metacognitive awareness, syntactic knowledge, and reading strategies (Bernhardt, 1991; Grabe, 2009; Koda, 2005, 2007). Research in reading has often tended to investigate the effect of these variables on reading comprehension at varying degrees, from different perspectives, within different frameworks or models (Qian, 2002), at different levels of proficiency (Stæhr, 2008) and different cultures or with subjects of different languages (Van Gelderen et al., 2004). In a recent study by Guo and Roehrig (2011) the respective roles of metacognitive reading strategies, syntactic awareness, and vocabulary knowledge in L2 in determining academic reading comprehension of Chinese-speaking university students were investigated. The results of the study, focusing on the performance differences between poor and good L2 readers, revealed that although there was a substantial correlation between metacognitive awareness and L2 reading performance, a combination of syntactic/lexical knowledge was a better predictor of reading in L2. The authors discussed the results of the study in relation to the threshold hypothesis (Alderson, 1984). According to this, L2 learners need to reach a certain threshold level in order to transfer general language knowledge into tasks conducted in L2. Guo and Roehrig (2011) concluded that the participating Chinese speakers of English in their study must have stayed below this “threshold” level and for this reason, they were not able to transfer their awareness of reading strategies into reading in English. As can be inferred from the studies cited in the literature review above, there are many variables related to or affecting academic reading comprehension. Although there are many studies that were conducted on the relationship between academic reading and some other reading and strategy related variables, there is nevertheless a need for more studies investigating academic reading comprehension of proficient adult EAP learners. The present study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

6. The study The purpose of the present study was to explore the role of three variables (depth of vocabulary knowledge, metacognitive awareness and syntactic awareness) in academic reading comprehension in L2. For this purpose, the following research question was addressed:

1) What is the relative importance of the investigated variables (depth of vocabulary knowledge, metacognitive reading strategies and syntactic awareness) in the explanation of academic reading comprehension in L2? Based on the literature summarized above, the present study hypothesized that depth of vocabulary knowledge was a significant predictor of academic reading comprehension (Hypothesis 1). Given the findings of previous studies (see Guo & Roehrig, 2011; Qian, 2002), syntactic awareness should be a significant predictor of reading comprehension for EAP students (Hypothesis 2) and finally metacognitive reading strategies should have an important impact on academic reading comprehension (Hypothesis 3).

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7. Participants 45 undergraduate students from the English Language Teaching (ELT) Department at a foundation university in Istanbul participated in the study. These students were either graduates of the English preparatory school of the same university or students having already got into the faculty after passing TOEFL exam. Demographic information about the participants is as follows:  51.7% were female; 48.3% male.  The range of their age varied between 18 and 32. The average age was 20.2. The undergraduate students involved in this study were teacher trainees enrolled in the ELT program of English medium university. They took all of their courses in the target language, English, and the program required the students to read a great deal of academic texts in English. The students were all assumed to be advanced at the same level of L2 proficiency depending on the information provided by their instructors offering Academic Reading and Writing, Oral Communication and English Composition courses. Of the two students, while one was a native speaker of English, the other was almost like a native speaker as she spent her high school years in the U.S. Therefore, they were excluded in the data collection session so that all of the remaining participants were at the same level of L2 proficiency. 8. Instruments 8.1. Academic Reading Comprehension measure (TOEFL-RBC 2000) In order to measure the academic reading comprehension of the English teacher candidates, a TOEFL-RBC test (TOEFL Reading for Basic Comprehension measure) was administered. The purpose for choosing this test is that it is an easily administered standard test which is widely conducted in university-level academic settings (Qian, 2002). It is a reading comprehension subtest of the 2000 institutional TOEFL Test and contains five passages and 50 multiple-choice questions. The internal consistency reliability of this measure was .85 in this sample. 8.2. Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge measure (DVK) As discussed earlier, depth of vocabulary knowledge (DVK) is a difficult construct to measure. Most measures assessing vocabulary knowledge in the current literature deal with the breadth of vocabulary knowledge (see for example, Mukarto, 2005 and Nassaji, 2004 for more detailed discussions on this matter) rather than depth of vocabulary knowledge of language learners. In recent years, a number of DVK measures have been developed (see Mukarto, 2005 for a detailed introduction to these instruments); but the DVK measure originally developed by Read (1998, 2000) is the one that has been consistently used in studies investigating the relationship between DVK and academic reading (for example, Guo & Roehrig, 2011; Nadajaran, 2008; Nassaji, 2004; Qian, 2002; Qian & Schedl, 2004). The mentioned instrument has been consistently reported to be a reliable instrument in the literature whose items were selected on the basis of measuring two aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge: meaning (synonymy and polysemy) and collocation, or the paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships of words (Qian & Schedl, 2004). To demonstrate its basic properties, the DVK measure included 40 items, each of which starts with one stimulus word, which is an adjective. The options for the items are placed in two boxes, each containing four alternatives, eight alternatives in total in each row. The left column contained 1–3 synonyms to the stimulus word. The right column contained 1–3 words which were in collocations with the stimulus word. Each item (in every row) had four correct choices. The left column was the meaning component and the right column was the collocation component. The right choices were not evenly spread in the instrument which means the respondent was not limited to equal numbers of correct responses to fill out in each item. An example of a test item can be seen in Fig. 1. As for scoring, each word, if correctly chosen, was awarded one point. The maximum score was 160 for the 40 items. The participants were given approximately 35 min to complete the test. The internal consistency reliability of this measure was .74 in this sample. 8.3. Syntactic Awareness measure (SAQ) To measure syntactic awareness abilities of the participants, a Sentence Combination Subtest of TOAL-4 subtest (The Test of Adolescent and Adult Language) was used. Only a limited number of tests can be found in the literature assessing syntactic

Accurate

(A) exact (B)helpful (C)responsible (D) reliable

(E) error (F) event (G) memory (H) estimate

Fig. 1. Example test item from the DVK measure.

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knowledge in L2. TOAL-4 is one of the popular measures that researchers used to investigate the relationship between syntactic knowledge and academic reading (see for example, Guo & Roehrig, 2011). The sentence combination subtest of TOAL-4 is a norm-referenced test that assesses receptive and expressive language (Hammill, Brown, Larsen, & Wiederholt, 2007). It asks the participants to write one grammatically correct sentence from the given two or more sentences. The sentence combination subtest includes 30 items in total. The internal consistency reliability of this measure was calculated to be .63 for this sample. 8.4. Metacognitive Reading Strategies Questionnaire (MRSQ) This Likert-type questionnaire was developed by Taraban, Kerr and Ryneason (2004) to measure college students’ awareness of the uses of reading strategies in the reading process. It includes 22 items. Participants are asked to rate how frequently they use the strategies listed on a 5-point Likert type scale (Never Use, Rarely Use, Sometimes Use, Often Use, and Always Use). The internal consistency reliability of this measure was .76 in this sample. 9. Procedure The four instruments were administered to all of the first year undergraduate students within a 3-h session in a regular classroom. When the students were asked if they wanted to participate in this study, they all agreed. The students were given as much time as they needed to finish the tests. First the TOEFL-RBC test, then the DVK, MRSQ and SAQ measures were administered. 10–15 min of breaks were given between the tests to ensure that the students would not feel exhausted. After each break, the participants were informed by the researcher about how to answer the items in each measure. The whole data collection procedure took approximately 140 min. The collected data were later analyzed in the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 18.0 program. 10. Data analysis The results of descriptive statistics for the four measures used in the study and the summary of the reliability results of the mentioned instruments are displayed in Table 1. As it can be seen the reliability values are at acceptable levels for each measure. Range and standard deviation values show how much the students differed from each other in terms of their achievement in measures used in this study. The fact that the calculated range for the measures was significantly low (see Table 1) indicate that the students did not considerably differ from each other in terms of their academic reading comprehension, syntactic knowledge, vocabulary knowledge or metacognitive awareness. The study aimed to examine which variables among depth of vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness and metacognitive awareness best predicted academic reading comprehension of EAP learners enrolled in an undergraduate program. To this end, a stepwise multiple regression analysis was conducted in which academic reading comprehension was dependent variable; depth of vocabulary knowledge, syntactic awareness and metacognitive reading strategies, independent variables. For all tests, the criterion for significance level was determined as p < .05. To decide which independent variable should enter into the equation first, the intercorrelations of the four measures were calculated. The correlation matrix is given in Table 2. According to the results of the multiple correlation analysis, it was decided that MRSQ should enter the multiple regression analysis as the first variable since it showed the highest correlation (r ¼ .811, p < .01) with TOEFL-RBC scores which purported to measure academic reading comprehension. As also shown in Table 2, the second variable to enter into the analysis was SAQ (r ¼ .625, p < .01) and the third one was DVK (r ¼ .533, p < .01) as they showed lower correlation coefficients. 11. Results The initial ANOVA analysis revealed that the regression model explained 74% of the variance and it was significant at .01 level (F ¼ 38.906, df ¼ 41, p < .001). Table 3 shows the results of the multiple regression analysis. The research question inquired which of the investigated variables (vocabulary depth knowledge, syntactic awareness, metacognitive awareness) were significant predictors of academic reading comprehension. The results of the multiple regression analysis indicate that (see Table 3) vocabulary depth knowledge was not a significant predictor of academic

Table 1 Means, standard deviations, reliability values, and obtained score ranges on the TOEFL-RBC, DVK, SAQ, and MRSQ. Variable

Mean – (MPS)

TOEFL-RBC DVK SAQ MRSQ

42.48 30.11 26.56 94.51

MPS: Maximum possible score.

– – – –

(50) (40) (32) (110)

SD

Range

Reliability alpha

2.806 2.156 1.816 1.802

9 7 7 15

.85 .84 .87 .91

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Table 2 Pearson correlations among the scores on the TOEFL-RBC, DVK, MRSQ and SAQ.

TOEFLRBC DVK MRSQ SAQ

Academic Reading Comprehension (TOEFL-RBC)

Depth of Vocabulary Knowledge (DVK)

Metacognitive Reading Strategies Questionnaire (MRSQ)

Syntactic Awareness Measurement (SAQ)

1

.533(**)

.811(**)

.625(**)

.284 .811(**) .692(**)

1 .256 .076

.256 1 .581(**)

.076 .581(**) 1

Note: N ¼ 45. **p < .01 (2-tailed).

reading comprehension. Nevertheless, syntactic awareness and metacognitive reading strategies (metacognitive awareness) were significant predictors of academic reading, metacognitive awareness being the strongest of these two predictors. 11.1. Vocabulary depth knowledge According to the results of the multiple regression analysis, depth of vocabulary knowledge was not found to be a significant predictor of academic reading comprehension (t ¼ 1.816; p > .05). The first hypothesis of the study (that academic reading comprehension could be explained by DVK) was not supported according to this finding. 11.2. Syntactic awareness In the multiple regression analysis, syntactic awareness was found to be a significant predictor of academic reading comprehension. Thus, the second hypothesis (that syntactic awareness was a significant predictor of academic reading comprehension) was confirmed (t ¼ 3.174; p < .05). However, in this analysis, syntactic awareness was also observed not to be a strong predictor of academic reading comprehension as metacognitive awareness was. 11.3. Metacognitive reading strategies (metacognitive awareness) Multiple regression analysis revealed that metacognitive awareness was a significant, indeed, the strongest predictor of academic reading of all the investigated variables (t ¼ 4.872; p < .001). According to this finding, the third hypothesis was confirmed. To recapitulate the research findings, the strongest of the variables affecting academic reading comprehension investigated in this study was metacognitive awareness. Although syntactic awareness was a strong predictor of academic reading success for EAP students with the same L1 background, the effect of metacognition on reading was significantly stronger. The depth of vocabulary knowledge, on the other hand, was not a good predictor of academic reading comprehension. All these results show that for proficient EAP learners with a homogenous L1 background, metacognitive awareness was a much better predictor of reading performance when compared to deep vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness. 12. Discussion Success in reading comprehension is fundamental to the academic success of foreign language learners and many language factors affect second language learners’ reading comprehension, such as vocabulary, and syntactic or grammatical knowledge (Bernhardt, 1991; Grabe, 2009). The present study investigated which variables would display the strongest predictive effect for academic reading comprehension in L2 with a sample of homogenous L1 background: depth of vocabulary knowledge (DVK), syntactic awareness (SAQ) or metacognitive awareness (MRSQ). The initial multiple-correlation analysis showed that L2 reading performance was highly correlated with metacognitive and syntactic awareness, but moderately correlated with depth of vocabulary knowledge (see Table 2). The multiple-regression analysis, on the other hand, revealed that depth of vocabulary knowledge was not a significant predictor of academic reading comprehension in L2, while syntactic awareness was a good predictor of academic reading comprehension. Moreover, the strongest predictor of academic

Table 3 Multiple regression analysis for variables predicting academic reading performance. Model

B

SE B

b

t

Sig.

Metacognitive awareness Syntactic awareness Depth of vocabulary knowledge

.174 .533 .231

.036 .168 .127

.527* .325* .163

4.872 3.174 1.816

.000 .003 .077

Notes: R2 ¼ .74; *p < .05.

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reading comprehension in L2 with a sample of homogenous L1 background was metacognitive reading strategies (see Table 3). These findings are incongruent with previous studies that looked into the correlation between DVK and TOEFL-RBC scores. The results of these studies suggest that, with a heterogeneous sample of mixed L1 backgrounds, depth of vocabulary knowledge was a significant predictor of academic reading comprehension (see Guo & Roehrig, 2011; Qian, 2002). However, the present study revealed some contradictory results with a sample of homogenous L1 background learners. Conducted in EAP context, this study helped to reveal which variables were better predictors of undergraduate students’ academic reading comprehension, when the L1 background was kept constant. This is in line with the frequently debated issue in the L2 reading literature that the effect of certain individual literacy skills such as vocabulary and syntactic knowledge on L2 reading comprehension cannot be discussed exclusively, without making references to each other; because there are many elements involved in the reading process (Chen, 2009), probably operating in peculiar ways for samples of different L1 and cultural backgrounds. There can be several reasons for the contradictory results of the present study: the students in this study were advanced EAP learners who are assumably above Alderson’s threshold level of L2 proficiency. L2 learners at this level are known to rely on metalinguistic awareness skills while dealing with tasks in L2. However, the EAP learners in this study were surprisingly not equally successful in the DVK measure which tested their knowledge of high-frequency adjectives. One reason for this could be that the DVK measure used in this study may not be the best instrument for this group of learners. However, the DVK measure originally developed by Read (1998, 2000) has been consistently used by researchers operating in L2 learning (see for example, Guo & Roehrig, 2011; Qian, 2002). So what can be the problem? As mentioned above, the items of the test were selected on the basis of measuring two aspects of academic vocabulary knowledge: meaning and collocation. According to Read (1998), for the development of academic vocabulary tests, having these two components is important because they reflect the actual diversity of words in the language. In the same vein, Qian and Schedl (2004) also asserted that not all learners could be successful at the DVK test used in this study because it requires knowledge of real language use in order to deal with the collocation part of the DVK. These arguments by Read (1998) and Qian and Schedl (2004) suggest that learners coming from a learning environment that does not support learning real language use may not be successful at such vocabulary measures. This can be what has been experienced by the learners in the present study. Another explanation can be that, in contrast to the present study, the previous studies mentioned above included samples from language learners who were below Alderson’s threshold level of L2 proficiency. There are no studies in the literature that examine the relationship between depth of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension with such advanced EAP learners like the students in this study, which makes it difficult to make comparisons. Moreover, there are also not many instruments in the literature that could be suitable for the present sample of advanced learners (See Mukarto, 2005 for a comparison of some available DVK measures in the literature). Maybe a different measure or a combination of measures that focus on different aspects of vocabulary knowledge could have been used in the present study. Still, the gap for a more suitable depth of vocabulary knowledge measure for advanced EAP learners exists in the literature. In addition to all of these possible reasons, the students in this study may have simply preferred to guess while responding to the DVK measure items, as also shown in Read’s (1993) research. Such behaviors on the part of the participating students may have affected their scores. As also discussed in the previous chapters, adult ESL learners tend to be less enthusiastic about gathering deep vocabulary knowledge in L2 which could help their overall success in L2 learning (Moir & Nation, 2002). Instead, except from one case study, they were all showed to focus only on passing their exams which negatively affected their L2 communicative skills because they were not able to see the connection between depth of vocabulary knowledge and productive and receptive use of the target language items (Moir & Nation, 2002: 23). This is also in line with the results found in the present study. The participant Turkish EAP learners, even though studying L2 at advanced level, failed to show adequate performance in the DVK measure. It would be more enlightening to discuss the significance of demotivation for deepening L2 vocabulary knowledge in EAP settings; however, it is very difficult since there is a lack of studies investigating the role of motivation for advanced ESL learners operating in an EAP context. More research is needed in this area to show the intricate patterns of factors affecting academic reading performance in L2 and also the role of metacognitive awareness of EAP learners in academic reading as shown in the present study. Skilled readers are known to be more adept at regulating the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies when engaged in academic reading tasks (Sheorey & Mokhtari, 2001). The participants in this study are also future EFL teachers who are equipped with advanced EAP skills. For this reason, they are assumed to possess somehow higher cognitive and metacognitive awareness than their EAP learner peers. For this reason, the result of the study can be interpreted as a natural outcome of being advanced learners of L2. Having mastered L2 in terms of macro and micro level language skills, they have relied on their metacognitive abilities rather than vocabulary and syntactic knowledge to be successful in an academic reading task. As also cited in the literature review below, Guo and Roehrig (2011) previously found that metacognitive awareness was not as important a predictor as knowledge of L2 syntax and vocabulary in determining reading comprehension for less advanced EAP learners. The authors discussed that this result provided evidence for Alderson’s “threshold hypothesis” which proposes that if L2 knowledge is below a particular level of proficiency, L2 learners cannot transfer their general reading knowledge to L2 reading comprehension. This was also the case for the students in Guo and Roehrig’s (2011) study: the language knowledge of their participants was below the threshold. Thus, they failed to transfer their general reading

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knowledge to L2 reading comprehension. This again can be discussed in relation to the threshold hypothesis: The EAP students involved in this study were proficient L2 readers, who were theoretically accepted as being above the “threshold”, which might have enabled them to transfer their metacognitive reading strategies into L2 reading processes. Bernhardt (2005) raised the question of whether strategic knowledge could compensate for weaknesses in syntax. The present study helped to answer this question to some degree: For the advanced EAP learners in this study, what contributed best to the academic reading performance were their metacognitive reading strategies. This result indicates that strategic knowledge indeed served as a back-up force in reading performance for advanced L2 learners. As discussed earlier, Bernhardt (2005) also called for research that would focus on L2 reading against the backdrop of linguistic variables accounting for L2 proficiency. In the literature, research on proficient EAP learners’ reading performance is scant. The present study also helped to provide evidence for this gap in the literature. When L1 background and L2 proficiency level were held constant, L2 reading performance was found to be highly correlated with metacognitive and syntactic awareness, but moderately correlated with depth of vocabulary knowledge for proficient EAP learners. Future research suggestions and educational implications in relation to these results are discussed in the following section. 13. Implications and future research Investigating the role of syntactic awareness, depth of vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive reading strategies in academic reading comprehension holds important theoretical and educational implications. First of all, the most important contribution of the present study was that it provided significant information about the use of metacognitive strategies by proficient EAP learners. However, large scale studies should be conducted to provide more evidence about whether metacognitive awareness will remain as a powerful predictor of academic reading comprehension when compared against some other linguistic (such as morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge) or non-linguistic variables (such as motivation). Second, the results of this study helped to re-emphasize the contribution of syntactic awareness to explaining academic reading comprehension of EAP learners. This study especially differed from previous studies in that the participants were all undergraduate students enrolled in an ELT program. As they are trained to become EFL teachers in a few years, the participants are assumed to be more equipped with distinguished L2 reading skills than their EAP learning peers. Although this study contributed important findings to the literature about the factors affecting academic reading comprehension of EFL learners from a homogenous L1 background, the main limitation of the study should be highlighted: Since the number of EAP learners in this study was small, future research should aim at including larger samples to have more generalizable results. Future research should also focus on other skills-related (for e.g. genre knowledge) and non-linguistic (for e.g. motivation and memory systems) variables which were not included in the present study that could help explaining the intricate mechanisms that determine EAP learners’ academic reading comprehension. With evidence coming from these studies, the superior role of metacognitive strategies as opposed to other linguistic variables investigated in this study and nonlinguistic variables cited above in reading performance of proficient L2 readers can be understood to a greater degree. 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