An Investigation into the Relationship between French and English Reading Abilities: Freshmen Students of the English Department at Meknes as a Case Study

This study strives to investigate students' reading ability across foreign languages in Morocco. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between French and English reading abilities. Specifically, it attempts to measure students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and explore its impact on English reading development. Data were collected using two reading comprehension tests in French and English and a reading strategy questionnaire. 80 freshmen university students in Meknes formed the sample of this investigation. In this regard, the study employed Pearson product-moment and partial correlation as statistical tools to analyze the generated data. The findings showed that there is no relationship between participants' French and English reading abilities. The study also revealed that metacognitive knowledge and mainly the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies of students has a significant positive impact on their English reading ability. Eventually, the findings of this endeavor have triggered various implications and recommendations for future research.