The Application Of Meta-cognitive Strategies To The Teaching Of English (Oxford Shanghai Edition) In Senior High Schools

In the past two decades, "meta-cognition" has become a buzzword in psychological research, and educators have recognized the significant role of "meta-cognitive" processing in influencing how successfully learners acquire knowledge and understanding. Meta-cognition essentially means cognition about cognition. It refers to both people's awareness and control, not only of their cognitive processes, but of their emotions and motivations as well; Activities such as planning how to approach a given learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task are described as meta-cognitive strategies. "Developing effective learning strategies suitable for students and promoting their abilities to regulate the learning process" are the top aims of English teaching explicitly suggested in Shanghai Primary and Secondary School Curriculum Standard; thus teaching students how to learn and fostering their learning autonomy come to be the focus of Shanghai Second Curricular Reform. Many researches indicate that the significant difference between successful and weak learners lies in their regulation of learning, therefore, meta-cognitive strategies, which allow students to plan, control, and evaluate their learning, have the most central role to play in facilitating students' autonomy.This study was conducted in Shanghai Shangbao High School, where 143 senior one students aged 16 to 17 took part in the survey examining their meta-cognitive knowledge and strategies. The Meta-cognitive Awareness Inventory developed by George Schraw & Rayne Sperling Dennison of Nebraska University was employed as an instrument to check their related knowledge and strategies, meanwhile students enrolling marks in English examination were also taken into consideration. Findings show that the students are poor in meta-cognitive knowledge, proper learning strategies, awareness of self-management and learning autonomy.In accordance with the findings in the survey, an experiment was carried out in two intact classes to verify whether explicit meta-cognitive training significantly improves English language learning. The instructions were conducted to the experimental class as follows: (1) Boosting students' motivations for strategy training and enriching their meta-cognitive knowledge. (2) Fostering excellent self-monitoring abilities in terms of planning, prevision, reviewing, and self-reflection upon progress. (3) Increasing their abilities to self-evaluate learning. Regarding the above three specific purposes of the experiment, three phases of training were conducted respectively. After a one-year training, results came out to be encouraging and promising. The students in experimental group performed better than those in the control group in (1) self-responsibility for English learning; (2) regular previewing and revision; (3) improvements of the abilities to plan, monitor and evaluate learning; and (4) increases in the awareness and abilities of independent learning.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One presents the importance of meta-cognitive training in high school English teaching, it includes a literature review regarding meta-cognition and meta-cognitive strategies centered in the definitions and models, the current trends in English teaching and necessity of conducting this study. Chapter Two discusses the theoretical basis of meta-cognitive strategies and the methods of strategy training; it also gives an overview of the contributions of Humanism and Constructivism to the development of meta-cognition, the definitions of learning strategy and relative researches in this area are also explored. Chapter Three introduces the meta-cognitive strategies embedded in senior high school textbooks (Oxford edition), it also involves the requirements toward teachers and students and the functions of self-efficacy. Chapter Four describes the survey conducted to senior high one students, data are collected, findings and implications are analysed. Chapter Five is dedicated to the training programme, the design of the experiment is presented, together with the materials and data collected. In the ending chapter, limitations of this experiment are also discussed.