Metacognition And English Reading Teaching In Senior Middle School

Metacognition can be defined simply as thinking about thinking. Metacognition is essential to successful learning because it enables learners to better manage their cognitive skills and to determine weakness that can be corrected by constructing new cognitive skills. The use of metacognitive strategies ignites one's thinking and can lead to more profound learning and improved performance, especially among learners who are struggling.Since Flavel put forward metacognitive theory in the year 1970s', linguists abroad have paid much attention to it, especially in reading, making the concept acceptable. But in China, only a few researches on English learning strategies mentioned metacognitive strategies. Even though the research abroad on metacognitive strategies in reading has shown that metacognitive strategies play an active role in reading comprehension. But we are not sure whether the result affects English reading in Chinese middle school.One of the tasks of our education is to develop self-directed or independent learners. So teaching students how to learn and how to monitor their learning process is of great importance. Researchers and teachers have gradually realized learning should be paid much attention to, and learning strategies should be trained for effective learning. Reading in FLA is by far the most important of four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), especially for students in higher level.A vast amount of research in first language reading and reading strategies has found that good readers are better at monitoring their comprehension than poor readers, that they are more aware of the strategies they use than are poor readers, and that they use strategies more efficiently.This article reports a study of metacognitive strategy training for reading in a senior middle school English reading classroom. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of strategy training on the reading ability of EFL middle school students. It also aims to obtain answers for the different effect of the strategy training on students' reading proficiency level and types of reading comprehension questions.The findings of the study showed that the reading strategy training does improve EFL middle school students' reading proficiency. Furthermore, the amount of gains made by the low and the intermediate reading proficiency group was found to be much greater than that made by the high proficiency reading group. Finally, the study revealed that the students' ability of grasping main ideas and of making inferences from given passages was significantly enhanced.