Language Teaching Research Quarterly

This study was designed to examine the effects of applying different cognitive reading comprehension strategies on the comprehension of descriptive, narrative, argumentative, and expository texts among Iraqi beginner, intermediate, and advanced EFL learners to investigate whether the benefits of cognitive reading strategies are consistent across EFL learners of different English proficiency levels and various text types. Hence, 300 Iraqi EFL learners were selected through a convenience sampling procedure from undergraduate students of Thi Qar University and were equally divided into three levels of English proficiency; each level included four experimental groups according to four text types. To measure the participants' improvement after implementing the treatment, 12 reading comprehension tests were constructed and administered twice, once before the study's treatment and once after the participants' exposure to cognitive reading comprehension strategies as a post-test. The findings implied the effectiveness of cognitive reading comprehension strategies for improving the comprehension of various text types among EFL learners of different proficiency levels. Moreover, it was revealed that cognitive reading comprehension strategies were more effective for the descriptive and the narrative texts. The results also showed that the intermediate and the advanced learners benefitted more than the beginners from the cognitive reading strategies.