The Study Of Metacognitive Strategy Training For Pre-school Education Majors Through Newspaper English Reading

The notion of "metacognition" was firstly introduced by John Flavell in the early 1970s. It is defined as "knowledge that takes as its object or regulates any aspect of any cognitive behavior". In foreign language acquisition the metacognition works as self-reorganization and self-reflection to how to acquire a language. Since the metacognition can regulate the learners'though process, and it's developing level restrict the learners'intelligence and thinking. In some degree the learners can make up the shortage of general abilities by improving their metacognitive strategies.With the rapid development of bilingual education in kindergartens, more and more children English teachers are needed. In recent years the enrollment scale of kindergarten teacher's training schools keeps expanding to meet the increasing need of the society. In the meanwhile the English teachers try to deepen the teaching reform to improving the students'English abilities. The author tried to introduce the metacognitive strategy into English instruction. With an domestic survey of metacognitive strategies application in English class find out that most of the researches focus on middle schools and colleges, and there are few about the training in children teacher's training school. So there is a pressing need to search for the metacognitve strategies training methods and models which adapt to the students of children teacher's training school.This thesis is an attempt to examine the rationale of metacognitive strategy instructions and to explore its constructive insights in the kindergarten teacher's training school.The study is designed as a quasi-experiment, and takes two natural classes of the first graders in a kindergarten teacher's training school as the subjects, experimental group and control group. The metacognitive strategies'classification includes: self-planning, self-monitoring, self-regulation and self-evaluation. The research was carried on by five steps: firstly, the author choose 103 pre-school education major students in the first-year class as the research subjects, the subjects were divided in to experimental group which has 52 members and control group which has 51 members. Secondly, the author make an investigation into the subjects'actual use of metacognitive strategies in their English study by the pre-training questionnaire, to find out whether there is significant difference between the EB and CG before the metacognitive training. Besides the pre-training questionnaire, an pre-test was conducted to compare the English proficiency of the two groups. Then the author trained EG the metacognitive strategies through English newspaper reading class in the second semester of primary two, 16weeks (2007.3—2007.6) , taking the 21 Centrury as the main reading material. In the meanwhile the CG still received traditional English reading instruction. Next, at the end of the semester the author gave the subjects of both groups another test to find out whether the subjects in EG perform better than the subjects in CG. The post-training questionnaire is designed to find out that the training can facilitate learner's reading ability. Finally, all data was collected and analyzed to draw an conclusion and concludes the implications from the research.In order to avoid other foreign elements interfere the research, the author has taken the following elements: 1. choose the first-year students as the subjects. Because the school assigned the classes only according to the students'entrance examination results and the place where they come from. So the two groups are almost same in quality; 2. all of the subjects are girls, there isn't the sexual difference; 3. both of the classes are taught by the same English teacher, moreover, the two classes share the same curriculum, textbook and schedule; 4. all of the data collection and analyses are reasonable.The findings show that the students who received metacognitive strategy training performed better than those who have never. It proved that: 1. metacognitive strategy training does improve the subjects'English reading ability; 2.the metacognitive strategy training embedded in newspaper English reading class improved the subjects'English reading; 3. the training under CALLA is also efficient to the students of kindergarten teacher's training school; 4. there is a positive transfer occurred, Metacognitive strategy training facilitates not only the students'English reading but other English skills. Based on the results of the research, the author proposes some tentative pedagogical implications: 1. the metacognitive strategies training embedded in reading class achieved good result; 2. in the training , the trainer must take various measures to monitor and direct the learners to keep using the strategies, which is very important to the training, 3. if the learners are without higher English proficiency, the teacher should give more direction in details, 4. it is necessary for teachers to shift from the traditional role to the role of instructor, supervisor and cooperator with enhanced overall qualities.