A Study On The Correlation Between Meta-cogniitve Strategy And Senior High School Student’s English Writing

Learning strategies have been paid an ardent attention by researchers both athome and abroad in recent years. Many studies indicate that meta-cognitive strategy,as an important learning strategy, is proved affective in English learning of vocabulary,grammar, listening and so on. However, few studies reported its correlation withwriting in China’s senior high school.In the present experimental study,100students from Ningjin senior high school,He Bei province, were chosen as subjects. The subjects were divided into two groups:the experimental group and the control group. The former group receivedmeta-cognitive strategy training in EFL writing embedded in the regular courses,while the latter group just got routine English teaching.Research instruments of a questionnaire, students’ journals, a pretest and aposttest of writing were used in the study, based on the theories of constructivismself-efficacy, meta-cognitive strategy and the Requirements of National EnglishCurriculum, the present study intends to investigate: the possibility for senior highschool students to use meta-cognitive strategy in EFL writing more often than beforethrough the meta-cognitive strategy training; whether senior high school students’writing proficiency can be improved through the training; whether meta-cognitivestrategy training affect English writing equally to senior high school students atdifferent levels.Through the qualitative data from students’ journals and the quantitative datafrom the questionnaire and writing tests, the data analyses showed the correlationbetween meta-cognitive strategy and senior English writing: the current situation ofsenior high school students’ meta-cognitive strategy use in English writing were atcomparatively low level, while through meta-cognitive strategy training, studentsincreased the frequency of meta-cognitive strategy use in their writing; students’overall writing proficiency was greatly improved through meta-cognitive strategytraining; the training was not equally effective to senior high school students atdifferent levels, students with low proficiency made significant improvement in both meta-cognitive strategies use and writing proficiency.The results of the present study are significant to EFL teaching, especially tosenior high school EFL writing teaching. In practical language teaching, strengtheningstudents’ awareness of using meta-cognitive strategies and implementingmeta-cognitive strategy training to students can encourage them to manage their ownstudies and help them foster a more reflective and autonomous EFL learning method,so as to improve their learning proficiency and facilitate them to become autonomouslanguage learners eventually.