AbstractThroughout Malaysia, concern is growing among educators about the increasing number of poor readers of English in the secondary school and at tertiary level. It has been found that a large number of students do not know how to recognize an unfamiliar word during the reading process. Thus, this inability hinders the comprehension of the readers, and eventually, these poor readers lose interest to read materials in the second language (L2). This study examined the effective methods to improve the word recognition skill among the poor readers. This study actually replicates the research done by Spedding and Chan (1991, 1993, 1994) experimenting on the Ll learners in Australia. The samples in this study are learners of English Second Language(ESL). In this study the experimental group was taught to use metacognitive strategies of word identification. These subjects were trained to use the orthographic clues and context clues to recognize unfamiliar words which they encountered in the.....