A Study Of English Reading Metacognitive Knowledge Of Chinese College Students

Metacognition, a psychological term, generally refers to an ability to think about one's cognition and to regulate one's mental processing. It is often related to effective learning and to competent performance according to the researchers in the field of second language acquisition research. Since 1980s a number of these studies have pointed out the way in which learners perceive language learning may have a significant impact on their learning outcomes. In other words, if learners have knowledge about their cognitive processes, they are more likely to achieve success in learning.In China, it has long been noticed that even when students can read in their second language, much of their reading is not fluent and they are not actively engaged with the text in a meaningful way. Thus, how to improve students' reading ability is always one of the major concerns in second language learning and teaching. Since most of the empirical studies in reading metacognition are conducted in the contexts outside China, whether their findings can be applied to English reading teaching in China remains a problem. Therefore, it is of theoretical and practical significance to conduct English reading research in China within the framework of metacognition.Taking the above-mentioned factors into account, the author of this present thesis tries to make a tentative investigation into reading metacognitive knowledge among Chinese college students. The data are collected mainly through a questionnaire. 110 students from the three natural college English classes in Wuhan University take part in the present study. The author adopts the theoretical framework of metacognitive knowledge presented by Flavell (1979) to analyze knowledge of person variables (what one perceives himself as a reader), task variables (whether one should vary methods to deal with different reading tasks and how one evaluates characteristics of a text) and strategy variables (awareness of some behaviors dealing with reading) of the subjects respectively.The major findings of the present study are presented in the following. Generallyspeaking, the subjects' metacognitive knowledge about their English reading is relatively insufficient. In the aspect of person knowledge, the subjects are not aware of their reading problems although they have moderate or strong self-efficacy and are well motivated. In the aspect of strategy knowledge, the subjects pay more attention to the localized strategies in connection with word meaning and sentence structures, but in the meantime neglect global strategies which require top-down processes and interactive processes of reading. They have some ideas of reading strategies mentioned in the questionnaire, but may lack the conditional and procedural knowledge of some strategies. In the aspect of task knowledge, most of the subjects think whether an author can reflect the main idea of a text clearly is an important factor, but some knowledge, such as knowledge of text structure may be limited and inadequate. In the meantime, there exist obvious differences in terms of whether they should react differently to different reading tasks.Metacognitive knowledge plays an important role in the subjects' English reading. As the result of the correlation test shows, significant correlations do exist between metacognitive knowledge and the scores of the reading test. By dividing the subjects into two groups, we find that those who have a higher level of metacognitive knowledge perform better in their English reading through the result of Independent-samples Mest. It indicates that we should improve training of metacognition in our English class.To sum up, this paper presents the present state of some Chinese college students' reading metacognitive knowledge and proves that there are links between metacognitive knowledge and reading performance. It is no denying, however, that due to the limited primary data and the limitation of the questionnaire, there undoubtedly exists room for further study. We hope to carry on this research in the future in order to have a fuller understanding of the application of metacognition in English reading.