Muhammad Younus

This study investigates the effects of strategy-based reading instruction on the reading comprehension and metacognitive reading strategy awareness of Pakistani Undergraduate Business Administration students of a private sector university in Karachi, Pakistan. A quasi-experimental design was adopted and two intact groups of students were assigned to a control group (31 students) and an experimental group (31 students). The reading comprehension levels and metacognitive reading strategy awareness of both the groups were measured through a pre-test of reading comprehension and Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS) questionnaire. The control group was taught through teacher-centred traditional reading instruction, whereas the experimental group was taught through strategy-based reading instruction for eight weeks through 2-hour long weekly sessions. The experimental group was trained to use 30 reading strategies (18 Cognitive, 7 Metacognitive, 3 social/affective, and 2 Test-taking strategies) during the intervention following the Cog-nitive Academic Language Learning Approach and using Reciprocal Teaching Procedure Activities. At the end of the reading intervention, the post-test of reading instruction and the measure of metacognitive reading strategy awareness (SORS) were re-administered. The data were analysed through descriptive statistics, t-tests, and ANOVA. The results revealed that the experimental group students had scored significantly higher than the control group students on reading comprehension post-test and had also shown significantly higher improvement in metacognitive reading strategy awareness than control group students The study recommends strategy-based reading instruction to be an effective option for teaching reading comprehension skills at the university level in Pakistani universities and in the contexts which share similar characteristics.