The Effectiveness of a Meta-comprehension Strategy to Develop Secondary School Students' EFL Creative Understanding and Reading Skills

The present research targeted enhancing secondary school students' EFL creative understanding and reading skills using the meta-comprehension strategy. The quasi-experimental design was used in the study. The study included sixty secondary school first year students. They were selected from Al-Gafariya Secondary School, Abo Hammad Educational Directorate, Al-Sharkia Governorate, Arab Republic of Egypt. The participants of the study were split into two equal groups: experimental and control groups. The experimental group was instructed using the meta-comprehension strategy whereas the control one received regular instruction. The treatment of the study lasted for three months during the first semester of the academic year (2023-2024). During this time, the researcher carried out fourteen sessions; each session took (90) minutes. To reach the goals of the study, the researcher designed instruments including; an EFL creative understanding checklist, a pre/posttest, and a rubric, an EFL creative reading checklist, a pre/posttest, and a rubric. The Statistics Package for Social Science (SPSS) program was used for analyzing the obtained data. The study outcomes showed that the experimental group outperformed the control one in mastering EFL creative understanding and reading skills using the meta-comprehension strategy. Thus, the meta-comprehension strategy had a great positive impact on promoting secondary school first year students' EFL creative understanding and reading skills.