On The Cultivation Of Students' Metacognitive Ability In Junior School English Writing Teaching

With the steady increase of interaction between nations, as the important tool of communication, English application ability has become even more important and essential. Among the five basic abilities, English writing ability will become one of the important criteria for qualified personnel in twenty-first century (Wen Qiufang, 1986). However, it can't be denied that English writing teaching and its related research are still weak and the writing ability of junior school students is far from satisfactory. Not a few students look on writing as impossible task. Moreover, they tend to depend on their teachers completely and are lack of active writing experience and effective writing practice strategies. Thus, investigating and exploring how to improve their English writing level through metacognitive strategy training bears important and far-reaching significance.Metacognitive strategies involve thinking about the mental processes used in learning process, monitoring learning while it is taking place, and evaluating learning after it has occurred. Although a great number of scholars, domestic and abroad, have carried out researches on metacognitive strategies from different perspectives, very little research has been done on metacognitive strategy instruction for English writing in junior middle schools in China.Wenden (1985) believes that learning strategy is the key to facilitating learner autonomy while the key to learning strategy is metacognition. To explore the actual effects of metacognitive strategy training on students'English writing, with two junior school classes as the subjects, the author of this study has carried out the investigation and research on metacognitive strategy training for English writing in junior school.Taking 96 students from Liupowu Middle School in YangXin County as the subjects, the present study carries out the metacognitive strategy training and research on junior students'English writing teaching. Based on Flavell's framework of metacognitive strategy theory and related learning strategy theory, with recent metacognitive strategy training achievements as the references, aiming at junior students'English writing teaching and training, this study wants to explore the effective metacognitive strategy training patterns for junior students' English writing. The instruments adopted in the present study include proficiency tests, questionnaires, interviews and video tapes and learners'records. During the training process, the subjects of the experimental class received metacognitive strategy training while the subjects in the control class follow the traditional way of teaching.Before and after the metacognitive strategy training, pre-test and post-test on students'language proficiency and metacognitive strategy application were conducted in both classes. The data is processed through SPSS11.5 for windows. Independent samples T-test and paired-samples T-test are performed to evaluate the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy cultivation. The results of the research reveal that metacognitive strategy training has effectively improved the subjects'employment of metacognitive strategies and language proficiency.The major findings of the present study can be summarized as the following. Firstly, the students can find out the reason why they are deficient in language abilities and full of painful experience. Secondly, the students do have the potential for mastering and managing metcognitive strategies, such as the strategy of laying equal stress on the contents, structure and language; vocabulary choice strategy, active experience strategy, modification strategy and the strategy of getting help from others. Besides, the students can refer to writing task and writing standard to carry on correct evaluation of their compositions.According to the targeted discussion and analysis, the present study holds that to enhance junior school student writing abilities, the intentional metcognitive strategy training is crucially important. Besides, in the process of cognitive strategy training, the teachers should strengthen the foundation of metacognitive ability, at the same time; the teachers should lay stress on improving the writing by reading; pay attention to meticulous designing writing tasks; strengthen the comment and appraise of students'compositions.