An Empirical Study On Learner Autonomy Of Vocabulary Learning For Senior High School Students Based On Metacognitive Strategy Training

Having taught English in th secondary school around ten years, the author foundthat vocabulary plays such an important role in language proficiency that the teachersand students dare not to ignore it; However, the current situation of vocabulary learningof high school students is unsatisfying. On the one hand, high school students are sobusy with their schoolwork that they can hardly set aside time to learn vocabulary inclass. on the other hand, even though time permitting, most students can not organizetheir study effectively. The fact requires the students to learn vocabulary autonomouslyout of class. However, as everybody knows, currently autonomous learning is not soefficient for Chinese high school students. It is urgent to find a way to help them out oftrouble.In recent years, with more and more people paying attention to learner autonomy,teaching students how to learn has become an important goal in education. And the keyto achieve this goal lies in mastering the learning strategies, among which aremetacognitive strategies. Metacognitive strategies are higher-order executive skillsinvolving abilities to make plans, monitor, regulate and evaluate the learning process.With the development of SLA, the importance of metacognitive strategies in languageacquisition has been accepted and metacognitive strategy training becomes a hot topicfor researchers at home and abroad. Therefore, the author believes it will benefit thestudents’ autonomous learning of vocabulary if they participate in the metacognitivestrategies training program.This research aims to test whether metacognitive strategy training has a positiveimpact on improving high school students’ autonomy in vocabulary learning. Eightystudents from two classes of second grade of Shifang Foreign Language School Attached to Beijing Normal University were selected to participate in the experimentand evenly grouped into two classes. One class is chosen as the experimental class(EC)and the other controlled class(CC). Students in the EC participated the training programwhile the CC did not receive the training. Before the experiment, the author had apre-test on students’ vocabulary size, metacognitive level and the application ofmetacognitive strategies in vocabulary learning in both of the classes. After the training,the author had a same test in the two classes. The data of the two tests were analyzedwith SPSS10.10to see if there is any difference between the classes after training.The results reveal that after training, students in the EC made great progress inmetacognitive awareness and application of the strategies in vocabulary learning and theEC also outperformed the CC in the vocabulary test, but the CC did not improve in thethree areas. Thus, it can be concluded that the metacognitive strategy training has apositive effect on high school students’ autonomy in vocabulary learning.From the experiment, the author summarized the findings and their pedagogicalimplications. The author also pointed out the limitations of the research and offeredsuggestions for further study.