Measuring ESL Students' Awareness of Reading Strategies

In this article, we describe an instrument, Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), which is intended to measure adolescent and adult English as a Second Language (ESL) students' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies (broadly defined here as mental plans, techniques, and actions taken while reading academic or school-related materials). We further suggest ways of using the instrument as a means of increasing learner awareness of reading strategies, which has been shown to help students improve reading comprehension skills. The development of SORS is our attempt to assist developmental education teachers in helping their ESL students increase metacognitive awareness and become thoughtful, constructively responsive, and strategic readers while reading academic materials-one of the major reasons for their learning of English. Three compelling reasons have motivated us to develop the SORS: First, there is strong research support for the positive relationship between students' metacognitive awareness of reading processes and their ability to read and excel academically (e.g., Alderson, 1984; Carrell, 1991; Clarke, 1979; Cziko, 1978). Second, although there are several instruments aimed at assessing native speakers' metacognitive awareness of reading processes (see Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002, for a brief review of these instruments), we could not find any published instruments that are specifically designed to assess ESL students' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading for academic purposes. Third, we have found that, even though there is some agreement among researchers that a number of reading strategies are transferable from one language to another (c.f., Alderson, 1984; Carrell, 1991), the existing instruments do not take into account some of the strategies that are unique to students who are literate in more than one language such as translating from English into one's native language or using both languages when reading to maximize understanding. Consequently, such instruments may not be appropriate for an ESL population. Finally, given the recent and projected increases in cultural and linguistic diversity in schools, colleges, and university classrooms (August & Hakuta, 1997), instructors will be in need of adequate tools for assessing skills and teaching students how to read academic materials efficiently and effectively. Instruments such as SORS should fit within a comprehensive reading assessment for ESL learners at the institution. It should effectively complement many of the traditionally used standard reading assessment tests, such as the Nelson Denney (Brown & Brown, 1993), which simply do not assess students' awareness and control of comprehension processes while reading. SORS is presented as a simple, yet effective tool for enabling students to develop a better awareness of their reading strategies, for helping teachers assess such awareness, and for assisting students in becoming constructively responsive readers. The development of the SORS was initially inspired by the review and use of another instrument Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), which was developed by Mokhtari and Reichard (2002) as a measure of students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. Because MARSI was originally designed for students who are native English speakers, it was inappropriate for use with non-native speakers, which led us to adapt it so that it could be used appropriately for an ESL population. The development of SORS was further inspired by our own experiences teaching language and literacy skills to college-level ESL students. Such experiences are highlighted by a series of observations concerning the mental processes some ESL students go through and the actions they take when reading for academic purposes. Auerbach and Paxton (1997) provide the following illustration of such processes: I used to believe that I have to know all the words in the English readings in order to understand the readings. …