Abstract:

Language learning is generally viewed as a quite demanding process. Considering its multi-faceted and intricate nature, there is an ongoing and ever-growing quest for new ways to render the learning period shorter and more effective. In this process, some contributive means such as language learning strategies are offered and employed as boosting and facilitating factors. Having its roots in the studies conducted to identify the common characteristics of successful language learners in 1970s, language learning strategies appear to be effective in terms of different language skills. As reading comprehension skill constitutes one of the most important aspects of competence in a language, language learning strategies promise some facilities in this context, too. Even though it can be easily observed that there is an ever-growing body of research on the use meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive and compensation strategies receive much less interest. In order to fill this gap, this study aims to find out whether teaching cognitive and compensation strategies for reading comprehension skill makes a statistically significant difference in the students’ reading performances. The subjects of the study are 60 first-year students attending the ELT program at Ondokuz Mayıs University. 30 students are assigned to the experimental group while the other 30 students are included in the control group. In order to specify the extent to which the treatment process is successful a pre- and post-test for reading comprehension were administered to the subjects. In order to evaluate the reading comprehension level of the students, ten multiple-choice questions, two open ended questions and four true-false questions are addressed to them in the test (pre-post test). The statistical analyses of the study are conducted by means of the SPSS software with statistical techniques like mean, standard deviation, frequencies and T-tests. The statistically significance level is accepted as p

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