Abstract
It was found out that the cognitive and the metacognitive strategies which enable students to use their prior knowledge or schemata increase the level of students' engagement in the learning process and thus stimulate their critical thinking and a greater awareness of other perspectives in reading. Therefore, this study which is based on the main principles of the schema theory aims at training EFL learners at the University of Hail on making connections between their prior knowledge and the reading text to improve students' understanding, critical thinking, and the quality of schema. Five questioning strategies were incorporated to make training more effective: KWL, questioning the author, self-questioning, guided questions, and making connections strategy such as self-to text connections, text-to text connections and text to world connections. The sample of the study consists of two groups: experimental and control. A schema-based test was designed to measure the students' achievement before and after the experiment. The results then were analyzed by t-test. It was found out that the type of instruction that students receive affects reading comprehension. And thus, teaching students to use cognitive and metacognitive strategies enables effective reading comprehension.