A Study On Non-English Majors' Use Of Metacognitive Strategies In Reading Comprehension

With the more frequent international communication, English is becoming increasingly important in this globalized world. Reading, as one integral part for Chinese students'English learning, is still one of the most important means for them to achieve language input and to acquire knowledge. However, English teaching and learning situation in college is quite distinct from that in middle school. On the one hand, college English curriculum has higher requirements for students in terms of the quantity of reading materials, their reading rate, and the depth in their understanding of texts. On the other hand, the teaching hours spent on reading in college are considerably reduced compared with those in middle school. To improve reading proficiency, college students are supposed to do a lot of reading outside the classroom. Therefore, the focus of college reading teaching should no longer be on imparting knowledge to students, but on how to assist them to become independent, autonomous and strategic readers.Learning strategy has become one of the research focuses in recent years in applied linguistics, and more and more researchers have realized the important roles that learning strategies play in helping students become efficient learners. Metacognitive strategies, as one type of learning strategies, have also drawn much attention from many researchers in the field of second language acquisition, and a lot of researches have been conducted so far. Although researchers' opinions over the definition and the classification of metacognition, and metacognitive strategies still differ, they all hold the same view that metacognition, or metacognitive strategies are of great importance in helping learners' learning, for metacognition is cognition about cognition, thinking about thinking. And metacognitive strategy, as a higher order executive learning strategy, means planning for, monitoring and evaluating learning, which contribute to more goal-oriented, self-regulated, and enjoyable learning.Taking into account the importance of reading for college students, the author of the present study makes a tentative study to explore a more effective way for college English reading teaching by conducting a data-based research into the use of metacognitive strategies by college non-English majors in English reading comprehension. Although some researches have been conducted in this field, their research findings can not be necessarily applicable to the subjects involved in the present research due to different research backgrounds and research methods. The subjects of the present study are first-year non-English majors, and the data are collected through a questionnaire and an English final term paper, which are then processed through SPSS (13.0).One research finding suggests that first-year non-English majors use a variety of metacognitive strategies in their reading comprehension, but with relatively low frequency. Another finding is that no significant difference has been found between male students and their female counterparts in their metacognitve strategy use. Finally, the study reveals that although there is no significant correlation between students' metacognitive strategy use and their scores in the section of reading comprehension in the final exam, their metacognitive strategy use and total scores are positively correlated.