Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies in Legal English: A Mixed-Methods Study of Vietnamese Economic Law Students

Abstract

This study investigated the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies among Economic Law students at Ho Chi Minh City University of Industry and Trade in the context of Legal English reading. Adopting a mixed-methods design, the study collected quantitative data through the MARSI-R questionnaire from 414 undergraduate students who had completed a Legal English course, alongside qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 12 purposively selected participants. The findings indicated that students reported moderate to high levels of metacognitive strategy use, with Problem-Solving and Support Reading Strategies employed more frequently than Global Reading Strategies. Among individual strategies, underlining important information emerged as the most frequently used, whereas having a clear reading purpose was among the least utilized. Independent samples t-tests revealed no statistically significant gender differences across all subscales. Qualitative findings further showed that students relied heavily on text-marking and specialized legal dictionaries to manage dense terminology and complex syntactic structures, while experiencing difficulties with pre-reading strategies and sustaining attention during reading. These findings extend existing research on metacognitive strategy use into the domain of Legal English and suggest the need for more explicit instruction in strategy use, particularly in relation to pre-reading planning and selective marking techniques.