Study On The Correlation Between Metacognitive Strategies And English Majors’ Reading Competence

In the early1970s, the American cognitive psychologist John Flavell first applied "metacognition" in his research on metamemory, which refers to metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies in the language learning process. Therefore, research on the metacognition has been divided into two parts. One is the research focused on the field of metacognitive knowledge to promote autonomous learning, and the other is the research concerned on the role of metacognitive strategies in language learning and its relationship with different learning aspects. And in the recent years, there has been many studies of the metacognitive strategy in the field of foreign language teaching and learning all over the world, especially some empirical studies. As for students in the Chinese context, reading works as one of the most important ways to acquire knowledge. In the reading activity, the readers acquire knowledge through the interaction of their prior knowledge and the reading information in text, along with a series of planning, identifying, guessing, monitoring, evaluating, etc. And there is no doubt that reading comprehension will be affected by the strategy use, which can help learners solve problems in reading and enhance their comprehension, thus the influence of metacognitive strategies in English reading requires further research.The paper tries to explore the general situation of college students’metacognitive strategy use and find out the relation between strategy use and their English reading proficiency, by means of investigating84English majors in two translation classes at Hubei University of Economics. And the study mainly revolves around the following questions:What type and frequency of metacognitive strategies do the students use in English reading? Are there any relationships between the metacognitive strategy adoption and the students’reading proficiency? What’s the significant difference in students’ metacognitive strategy use at different levels of reading abilities?To answer the questions above, a questionnaire survey on metacognitive reading strategies and interviews are conducted to sophomores and their teachers at Hubei University of Economics, and the data concerning about the metacognitive strategy use and students’reading performance is collected into SPSS17.0. through analyzing descriptive statistics, we have the following results:College students’metacognitive reading strategy use is generally in a medium level, but their adoption of three broad strategy types is in an unbalanced state. Most students can only use some global strategies to regulate their reading process, but they employ few strategies related to monitoring or evaluating their reading activities.through the result of interviews, it can be seen that faced with the pressure of test-oriented education mode, students tend to acquire some short cuts to find the right answers instead of attaching importance to the cultivation of abilities in strategy use. And there is a significant correlation between students’ English reading competence and their use of metacognitive strategies, also there are some differences in using metacognitive strategies between students at different level of reading competence.