| The main aim of this paper is to research the metacognitive strategies employed by Chinese postgraduates of non-English majors while reading academic English texts. To be specific, what metacognitive strategies are frequently or seldom used by them in academic English reading. It also aims to investigate the factors influencing their choice and use of metacognitive strategies. In addition, it also aims to investigate through the qualitative study how they use these strategies.It is to provide empirical evidence that metacognitve strategy use is affected by many factors. It draws attention to the influence of individual learner differences and the nature of academic English texts on metacognitive strategies use. The pedagogical implication is to try to arouse the awareness of the influence of these two major factors on the learning strategies and to promote both college and graduate school academic English teaching and learning.The present study consists of two researches: a survey study and a qualitative study. Firstly, the author conducted a survey study through questionnaires to investigate what metacognitive strategies were frequently or seldom used by the postgraduates of non-English majors and what factors affected their choice and use of the strategies. Secondly, the author carried out a qualitative study through interviews and think-aloud sessions to further investigate the postgraduates' use of metacognitive strategies in academic English reading comprehension when the materials being read were specialized academic reading, and how they used these strategies. The survey study revealed that the metacognitive strategies most frequently used in academic reading activities were using background knowledge, problem identification, paying attention to topic sentences, paying attention to connectives, use of prediction and contextual clues, self-monitoring, advance organization, translation, goal-setting, using comparison and contrast in descending order.The data provided by the qualitative study was consistent with the previous survey study. The predominant strategies frequently mentioned by the five participants were using background knowledge, problem identification, paying attention to topic sentences, use of prediction and contextual clues, paying attention to connectives, and translation.However, the rest eight metacognitive strategies, picking out key words,paraphrase, summarization, strategy evaluation, self-management, performance evaluation, and functional planning, self-questioning, which were also frequently mentioned by many researchers, achieved low scores in this study. Especially strategy evaluation, performance evaluation, self-questioning, self-management and functional planning achieved average scores under 3.0000. The study revealed that individual learning techniques, attitudes and motivation, the difficulty of the reading material, the content of the reading material, and intelligence and aptitude ranked the top five important factors affecting the choice and use of metacognitive strategies. Then the correlation analysis showed that using background knowledge and problem identification had no significant correlations with any factors investigated. Paying attention to topic sentences had significant positive correlation with character, and strong positive correlation with attitudes and motivation. Paying attention to connectives was found to have strong positive correlation with brain hemisphericity. Use of prediction and contextual clues displayed significant correlation with individual learning techniques. Self-monitoring, advance organization, and translation displayed no significant correlations with any factors investigated. Goal-setting showed significant negative correlation with the content of the reading material. In addition, using comparison and contrast displayed strong positive correlations with character, risk-taking, attitudes towards the teacher and the material, and weak significant positive correlation with reading purpose.The findings did prov... |
PDF Full Text Request