Reading Motivation, Metacognitive Awareness, and Reading Achievement among Eleventh-Grade Students

Reading achievement is influenced by a variety of cognitive and affective elements, with reading motivation and metacognitive awareness identified as two of the most important. This study examined (1) the relationship of students' reading motivation and reading achievement, (2) the relationship between metacognitive awareness and reading achievement, and (3) the combined contribution of reading motivation and metacognitive awareness to reading achievement among eleventh-grade students at SMAN 1 Sungai Lilin. Employing a quantitative correlational research design, The population for this research comprised 344 students enrolled in the eleventh grade from ten classes. Cluster random sampling was then applied to obtain a sample of 106 students. Data were gathered through the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ), the Survey of Reading Strategies (SORS), and a reading achievement test. The obtained data were processed and analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 25, which included descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlation, partial correlation, and multiple regression. The findings showed that a positive relationship of moderate strength was associated with reading achievement (r = .600, p < .001), whereas metacognitive awareness demonstrated a strong positive relationship with reading achievement (r = .791, p < .001). In addition, the partial correlation analysis revealed a significant but weak positive association between reading motivation and metacognitive awareness after controlling for reading achievement (r = .304, p = .002). Reading motivation and metacognitive awareness explained 64.5% of the variation associated with reading achievement (R² =.645), according to the multiple regression analysis. These findings underscore the important roles of both reading motivation and metacognitive awareness in supporting students' reading achievement and suggest that both factors should be explicitly integrated into reading instruction to enhance students' reading performance