Turkish Students’ Comprehension Monitoring and Strategic Behaviors While Reading in French: A think-aloud study

Abstract

  The present study aims to examine how Turkish students of French monitor their understanding and how they behave strategically when reading a French literary text. Differences between more proficient and less proficient readers are also explored in terms of types and frequencies of strategies used during the global monitoring cycle, which encompasses Evaluation, Action, and Checking phases. The data was collected through think-aloud protocols from eight students who studied French in the Department of Foreign Languages at a Turkish university. The findings reveal that the participants used mostly instrumental strategies from the Action phase to deal with problems at word or sentence level. Furthermore, they show that the more proficient participants in the study used a wider range of strategies from different phases of the monitoring cycle more frequently compared to their less proficient counterparts. However, the only significant difference found between the two proficiency groups relate to the skipping and ignoring a problem strategy.