Metacognitive Strategy Training In Developing English Autonomous Learning For Junior Middle School Students

Learning is a lifelong process, many educational researchers believe that the ultimate goal of education is to foster students’autonomous learning and make them autonomous learners. It has been widely accepted that much attention should be attached to autonomous learning. The author found most of the students in middle school usually are not autonomous learners in learning English and they lack the learning strategies to develop their ability of autonomous learning. With the development of the research about autonomous learning in applied linguistic field, a variety of strategy trainings to learners’autonomous learning ability has become one of the researchers’interests. In this study, the author tries to develop English autonomous learning for junior middle school students through systematic metacognitive strategy training.Holec (1981) defined autonomy as "the ability to take charge of one’s own learning". Autonomous learning has been developed both in theory and practice ever since its appearance in the1960s. Autonomous learning is not an abstract concept, but a capacity acquired by a series of specific strategy training, and can be developed continuously. Metacognition was first put forward by American psychologist Flavell in1979. He recognizes that metacognition consists of both metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies. Metacognitive strategies involve thinking about the learning process, planning or learning, monitoring the learning task, and evaluating how well one has learned. Researches on learning strategies show that metacognitive strategies are important to learners’language efficiency, and successful use of them helps to improve autonomous learning, and metacognitive strategy training can enchance their autonomous learning abilities.This thesis is an experiment-based study that examines the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy training. The experiment was conducted among80first-year junior middle school students from two classes that the author taught. One is as experimental class, the other one as control class. During the experiment, the author put metacognitive strategy training into English teaching, while in control class, traditional teaching plan is followed. After the experiment the author used SPSS to analyze the data, which showed that significant changes have taken place. The result of the experiment indicates that the students in experimental class have greatly developed their ability of autonomous learning and the average score is higher than that in the control class. And the two questionnaires results show that the students in experimental class benefit by using more metacognitive strategy training. Most of them claimed that they have a higher motivation in English learning. This achievement shows that the training of metacognitive strategies integrated into the English teaching is helpful to develop junior middle school students’ability of autonomous learning as well as improve their grades.