The Use of Cognitive Reading Strategies to Enhance EFL Students' Reading Comprehension

This study is descriptive research investigating cognitive reading strategies frequently used among EFL students at one of universities in Garut, Indonesia, to enhance their reading comprehension. This study also aims to find out which cognitive reading strategies considered the most helpful to be developed by the EFL students especially in answering questions in reading comprehension test successfully. The data were obtained from two sources: a self-report questionnaire administered to 76 students and Thinking-Aloud Protocols (TAPs) conducted with 15 students. The data were analyzed using instruments adapted from Format Cognitive Reading Strategies based on previous study conducted by Ozek&Civelek (2006). The results show that cognitive reading strategies most frequently used by students are using the title to predict the content of the text, guessing the meaning of a word from context, using the dictionary for the important words, and considering other sentences in the paragraph to figure out the meaning.eng