An Empirical Study On The Metacognitive Strategies Used By Ethnic Preparatory Students In English Reading

Reading is the most important skill of the four basic language skills for language learners; it is true especially in ESL or EFL (Anderson,1991). Thereby, how to enhance the reading comprehension ability has always been a problem under research. In recent years, researches have demonstrated that reading comprehension is not only a process of understanding words, sentences, or even texts, but involves a complex process integrating the readers’ prior knowledge, language proficiency and their metacognition strategies. Most researchers consider metacognition as an element necessary for many cognitive learning tasks. The use of these strategies has proved to be effective in improving students’ reading comprehension (Brown1981; Balzer&Brown1984; Palinscar&Brown1984,1985). The influence of metacognitive strategies on reading has become hot topic of the researchers both at home and abroad. So it is practically important to research on reading to improve learner’s reading efficiency. However, most research subjections are college students or high school students, the research on EFL reading strategies used by ethnic preparatory students is more rare.Based on the theory of metacognitive strategy, an investigation was designed and administered to90ethnic preparatory students in ethnic preparatory educational school of Ningxia university. The aim of this research is to explore the use of reading strategy among ethnic preparatory students in Ningxia universities. The research questions are as follow:1) What is the status quo of the ethnic preparatory students’use of metacognitive strategies in English reading, and what is the frequency?2) What are the differences between high achiever and low achiever in using metacognitive strategies? 3) What is the relationship between metacognitive strategy use and English reading proficiency?SPSS17.0was employed for conducting all the statistic analysis. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data generate the following results:(1) The two year ethnic preparatory students in Ningxia University do use the five metacognitive strategies during their reading process; have a medium level in using metacognitive strategies. Among the five metacognitive strategy categories (planning, self-management, selective attention, monitoring and evaluating), the selective attention strategy category is most frequently used, while the evaluating strategy and planning strategy is least used by them.(2) Significant differences exist in the use of metacognitive strategies between high achievers and low achievers.(3) There exists significant correlation between the metacognitive strategy use and their reading proficiency, and their correlation coefficient is positively correlated with each other. The five metacognitive strategies have an influence on reading proficiency.It is suggested that teachers should try to have a clear understanding of ethnic preparatory students’ metacognitive strategies about reading and guide the students to improve their reading by effectively using metacognitive reading strategies and promote ethnic preparatory students’English reading proficiency.