The Influence Of Meta-cognitive Strategies On English Achievements Of English-majors From Private Universities

Metacognitive strategies are taken as the most advanced and core factor of human's mental power, which is the key to exploring one's intelligence, potentiality and language proficiency. Over the past few years, most of the researches on metacognitive strategies have a tendency to focus on students in government-run universities. However, along with the advance of the system of national education, gradually non-government funded education becomes part of our national education. And students from private universities have their own characteristics, such as relatively poor foundation, non-systemic command of English, lack of self-confidence etc. Thus, the learning situations of the students should not be neglected.The thesis is devoted to examining students' use of metacognitive strategies by investigating 225 English majors from 3 private universities in Shaanxi Province through questionnaires. SPSS17.0 software was employed to process the date. In the experiment, descriptive statistics was chosen for analyzing the overall situation of metacognitive strategies and each category of them; ratio analysis was conducted to probe into the differences in metacognitive strategies between males and females; a correlation analysis was adopted to analyze the correlation between metacognitive strategy use and TEM-4 scores; statistical analysis was performed to examine the differences in the use of metacognitive strategies between high and low achievers.The results are reported like follows: (1) The use of metacognitive strategies and its three subcategories are in medium level, and there is almost no difference in the use of these three subcategories. (2) There are remarkable differences in the use of metacognitive strategies as gender varies. Girl students are more skillful at using the planning and monitoring strategies than boy students. However, in the use of the evaluation strategy, there is no significant difference between them. (3) There is a significant positive correlation between metacognitive strategy use and TEM-4 scores. And also the scores correlate positively with the three subcategories (monitoring, planning and evaluation strategies) at the level of 1%. (4) The mean value of high achievers is much higher than that of low achievers in planning, monitoring as well as evaluation. High achievers are better than low achievers in metacognitive strategy use and its three subcategories. High achievers could use the strategies more frequently and effectively than others.