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

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