Gender Differences Of Chinese College Students' (Non-English Major) English Reading Metacognitive Strategy

Metacognition is commonly defined as "cognition of cognition". As an important component of metacognition and learning strategy system, the importance of metacognitive strategy has been to some extent well-studied. In the studies of learning strategy system, Oxford (1990) classifies learning strategy into two categories, i.e. direct strategy which involves memory strategy, cognitive strategy and compensating strategy and indirect strategy which involves metacogntive stratey, social (affective) strategy. O'Malley and Chamot (1990) classifies learning strategy into three categories i.e. metacognitive strategy, cognitive strategy and social (affective) strategy., in which metacognitive strategy is considered at a level above other strategies. In Zheng Ming's (2000) classification, metacognitive strategy is alo considered at a level above other strategies. The status of metacognitive strategy mainly lies in the differences between metacogntive strategy and cognitive strategy. Metacognitive strategy is mainly concerned with monitoring and regulating at a macro-level, to plan, monitor and evaluate learning, while cognitive strategy is more concerned with the operation at the micro-level and direct management of specific tasks. Metacognitive strategy is more concerned with monitoring and regulating at a macro-level, which not only influences the learning process itself but also affects the employment of various strategies in this process, such as cognitive, communicative, social (affective) strategies etc.The employment of metacognitive strategy can be influenced by various factors, such as age, language proficiency etc, a typical one of which is gender. This paper attempts to explore the relationship between gender and metacogntive strategy from two perspectives: 1. Are there any statistically significant differences between males and females at the same reading proficiency level? 2. If there are significant gender differences, then what are they?Through one reading proficiency test of 110 students from two classes, 28 students were selected, of whom 14 are males and 14 are females. The 110 students from two classes were also given the questionnaire to finish. 100 questionnaires arevalid. The 28 students' questionnaires were selected for analysis.The questionnaire is designed, in the theoretical framework of Oxford's classification of metacognitive strategy, by referring to Oxford's .Strategy Inventory for Language Learning(SILL)(version for foreign students) and O'Malley and Chamot's study of metacognitive strategy as well as other available literature on metacognitive strategy The questionnaire was pre-tested and corrected and polished many times. The statistical analysis results by SPSS (12.0) show that females have an obviously higher frequency in category 2, 6 and 9. No obvious gender differences are found in the rest categories. Females have a relatively high frequency in using category two and six. For the rest 8 categories for females and all the categories for males, the frequencies are all relatively low. The questionnaire's Cronbach's Alpha is calculated to be 0.8636>0.70, which shows that the investigation by the questionnaire is reliable.Questionnaire is mainly to investigate the conscious and already known metacognitive strategies. To investigate those unconscious metacognitive strategies, think-aloud is employed. Think-aloud is the reader speaks out his (her) thinking during reading. Through analyzing the transcripts from the recording of the reader's words, the metacognitive strategies are discovered.Six students are randomly chosen from the 28 students, of whom three are males and three are females. The whole think-aloud are conducted by following strict procedures, such as pre-training, recording, transcribing and analyzing etc. The think-aloud tasks are selected from the reading comprehension section of College English Test, Band Four (CET-4) (January, 2004), one being an exposition and one being an argumentation. Because the think-aloud only studies the reading process of two passages, it...