Investigating The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies In English Majors' Reading

"Metacognition"is one of the latest buzz words in educational psychology, yet it's not as daunting a concept as it might seem. We engage in metacognitive activities everyday. Metacognition enables us to be successful learners."Metacognition"was first put forward by an American psychologist John Flavell in his book Cognitive Development. This concept has been frequently used in the psychological field in nearly twenty years. It also becomes a key research question in the learning strategies. Keeping a particular metacognitive knowledge in mind, Metacognitive strategies are applied for many kinds of skills. Metacognitive strategies refer to the learning strategies that need planning, learning, thinking along with learning, observing one's processing or understanding, and evaluating final learning results. In the whole progress, Metacognitive strategies are deemed as summit order executive skills that ensure the success of the planning, monitoring and evaluating of a learning activity. As reading is one of the most important means of acquiring knowledge, reading activities and strategies have always been the research focus of numerous studies at home and abroad. The reader proactively links his or her knowledge with the reading information when processing planning, being aware of, guessing, interpreting, checking, observing and evaluating, etc along the learning activity. During this process, the procedures of reading comprehension will be impacted by strategies involved. The reading process and proper strategies adopted to solve the problems during it should be defined deliberately. Readers who are not strategic often encounter difficulties in their reading. These early difficulties in reading may influence the way readers learn throughout the rest of their lives.The paper explores the condition of the use of metacognitive reading strategies by English majors in the English department at Changchun Taxation College and tries to find answers to the following points: How often do the students use metacognitive strategies in English reading? What problems do the students have in using metacognitive strategies in reading? What are the possible reasons for the problems?To answer these questions, a questionnaire and an interview concerning about the use of metacognitive reading strategies by English majors are designed and administrated to both teachers and students. After analyzing the data, we obtained the following results: Metacognitive reading strategies are less used by English majors. Most students can only employ a little planning stategies while reading, but they seldom use monitoring and evaluating strategies. Not only teachers but also students should reflect on what an active reading process involves. Students are encouraged to intentionally regulate and discipline the reading process and efficiently adopt appropriate metacognitive strategies to solve the problems during it. Whereas the test-oriented reading education as well as the monotonous criterion for assessing reading competence in most English examinations, makes the trends of over focusing on scores and ignoring students'real capability in using metacognitive reading strategies. Measures should be taken to enhance both teachers'and students'awareness of the importance of metacognitive strategies in reading. No matter what your goals, language learning takes a long time, much longer than you may have ever anticipated. We insist that a large amount of reading lays a good foundation of the application of metacognitive reading strategies.There are limitations to the research in three aspects. Firstly, the scope of the sampling is confined to the English department at Changchun Taxation College. The number of students subjects is only limited to 108, which lacks much higher popularity. The results of this present study remain to be deeply tested in a large-scale research. Secondly, more teachers are expected to be involved in the interview. At last, the instrument is expected to become more perfected. For example, there are still some parts which are important but missed in the questionnaire. Thus, additional studies will continue in two directions: on the use of metacognitive strategies in English majors'reading in other colleges and universities, and what to do for successful and efficient application of metacognitive reading strategies. It is hoped that what has been put forward in this paper can be of some value to the colleagues.