The Impact of Metacognitive Strategies Instruction through Individual versus Collaborative Tasks on Iranian Intermediate EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension remains a central goal in EFL education, yet learners’ metacognitive awareness often limits transfer of strategies to authentic tasks. Collaborative strategic reading (CSR) integrates metacognitive strategies within group activity, potentially enhancing comprehension through social interaction. In Iranian EFL contexts, limited empirical work compares collaborative versus individual metacognitive interventions against conventional instruction. The present quasi-experimental study examined these approaches to determine their relative effectiveness for intermediate learners; that is, it probed into the impact of metacognitive intervention through collaborative versus individual reading tasks, compared with the conventional reading instruction, through the collaborative strategic reading (CSR) model. To this end, 75 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were identified through Oxford Placement Tests (OPTs) and further randomly assigned to two experimental groups and a control group, each having 25 participants. The experimental groups received the metacognitive intervention through collaborative versus individual reading tasks and the control group followed the conventional reading instruction in place at the two high schools in Sari, Iran. Results revealed the higher impact of the metacognitive intervention through the collaborative reading tasks followed by the individual reading tasks and the conventional reading instruction. Our findings have collectively pointed to the effectiveness of the CSR model and introduced it as an effective reading instructional approach within the metacognitive reading instruction framework, which has the capacity to improve the reading comprehension of Iranian intermediate EFL learners. Implications and directions for future research are also provided at the end.