Comprehension monitoring across languages – The effect of online feedback

Background: Reading and comprehending texts is challenging for students in higher education, especially when reading in English as a foreign language (EFL). An important component of efficient reading comprehension is the ability to accurately self-monitor understanding and performance, though most readers are not accurate at monitoring their comprehension. Aims: This study investigated whether online, immediate and repetitive feedback on the process of calibration of comprehension, can improve comprehension monitoring when reading in native (L1) and foreign languages (FL), and whether such improvement can be generalized across languages. Sample: Participants were 138 undergraduate Hebrew-English bilingual university students. Methods: Monitoring accuracy was calculated through the paradigm of ‘calibration of comprehension’. Participants were divided into four study groups according to the language of reading (L1 or FL) and the exposure to feedback on calibration (with or without). Participants attended a total of five study sessions: a pre-exposure session, three exposure sessions and a fifth post-exposure session. Results: Only students who engaged with texts in the FL and received feedback showed improved monitoring accuracy. This improvement did not generalize to their L1. Conclusions: Pedagogically, these results indicate that comprehension monitoring skills can be improved through online, immediate and repetitive feedback, especially in the FL. We suggest that FL comprehension was amenable to change because it met the optimal level of text difficulty to engage participants with the monitoring process. Thus, online feedback supported by digital technology may offer distinctive educational opportunities for bolstering comprehension monitoring.