A Study On Metacognitive Strategy Training In Reading Teaching Of Senior High School

As is known to us all, reading plays an important part in the English teachingamong the whole English-teaching system. The students’ English reading ability canhave great connection with the quality of teaching. And improving the high schoolstudents’ reading ability is one of the main objectives in our senior high schoolEnglish teaching. Therefore, English reading teaching has been paid much moreattention to in senior high schools. And both teachers and students also spend moretime in improving the students’ reading ability. However, the result is satisfactory,which has made us puzzled a lot.There are many reasons that lead to such an unsatisfying situation in Englishteaching. And one of the most important reasons is the traditional method of readingteaching, which emphasizes teachers’ dominant roles and neglects students’important roles. Teachers always spend most of their time in transmitting theknowledge of words, phrases and sentence structures, even the rules of grammar.Thus the traditional reading teaching is “spending more time with lower efficiency”.Although there has been much research on English reading teaching and learning,most research has been done on the methods of teaching and reading strategies. Butstudents-the main body of reading teaching are usually neglected. Meanwhile,students’ effort is the main cause in improving their reading ability. Therefore,training students’ metacognitive learning strategies in reading is an effective way toimprove learners’ reading competence and the efficiency of reading teaching.The conception of metacognition was first mentioned in the1970s by Flavell, anAmerican psychologist. After that, the effect of it in school language learning hasbeen recognized gradually. The research of metacognitive knowledge and strategiesin China was started in the1990s, and a number of positive results have beenachieved. However, few researchers focus on reading strategies, and most of theresearch in metacognitive strategies was carried out more on the students ofuniversities than on those of senior high school as the subject.If we apply the metacognitive strategies to their learning process, the studentscan autonomously plan their learning, select and adjust the learning strategies,monitor the process, and evaluate the results of learning. The former research hasproved there are some correlations between the metacognitive strategies and Englishproficiency. Therefore, metacognitive strategies have played an important role in improving and promoting the learning of English.The aim of the research is to explore the effect of metacognitive strategiestraining in English reading of senior high school, and the author tries to answer thefour questions: the present state of metacognitive reading strategies applied bystudents of senior high school; whether metacognitive reading strategy trainingeffectively can increase metacognitive awareness of students of senior high school;how to instruct meta-cognitive reading strategy effectively; whether metacognitivereading strategy training plays a positive part in enhancing reading proficiency ofstudents in senior high school. The subjects of the research are Grade-one students inShouguang No.1Senior High School. The instruments are the questionnaire, pre-testand post-test, and the reading diaries from the experimental group. The research lastsfor a term and the data was analyzed through SPSS17.0, statistical software.After data collection and analysis, we have got these answers to each of thequestions above. The findings of the study are: the application of metacognitivereading strategies in senior high school is at a less frequency; with the in-classtraining based on the think-aloud method,we can make the students perform betterand learn more; metacognitive reading strategies training plays a vital part inEnglish reading of students in senior high school. In the test of readingcomprehension, the students in experimental group show the greater progress in theirlanguage proficiency.This empirical study illustrates the students in experimental group haveperformed much better compared with those in control group, practically shows thatmetacognitive perspective of reading teaching method in Grade-one in senior highschool is obviously superior to the traditional reading teaching methods. The resultshows that the metacognitive reading strategies training can arouse the students’interest of English study, and improve the reading ability, confidence and creativity.