A Study On The Correlation Between Non-English Majors’Metacognitive Awareness Of Reading Strategies And Their Reading Comprehension Ability

As the ESL learners in a second language, the ability to read the written language at a reasonable rate and with good comprehension has long been recognized to be as important as oral skills, if not more important. What’s more, strategic reading is critical in school learning where strategies play a significant role. Despite many researches on the strategies aimed at improving advanced learners’reading comprehension ability, there is a lack of researches on the relationship between advanced students’metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and their reading comprehension ability in China.In this thesis, through quantitative and qualitative analysis, the author collected144non-English majors’relevant information in order to address these questions:the status quo of non-English majors’metacognitive awareness of reading strategies; the differences in the metacognitive awareness of the overall reading strategies and specific reading strategies among students with high, intermediate and low reading comprehension ability; the correlation between non-English majors’metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and their reading comprehension ability?The collected data was analyzed by SPSS16.0. To investigate the students’ perceived use of reading strategies, the differences of metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, and the relationship between the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and reading comprehension ability, Frequency Distribution, One-way ANOVA, Comparing Means and Pearson Correlation were conducted.The major findings relevant to research questions are as follows:Non-English majors’metacognitive awareness of the overall reading strategies is at a mediate level. Students experience a high level of the perceived use of problem-solving stratetegies, followed by the global reading strategies. As for supporting reading strategies, their metacognitive awareness is also at a medium level. There exist significant differences in the overall metacognitive awareness of reading strategies between students with intermediate reading comprehension ability and students with low reading comprehension ability, and between students with high reading comprehension ability and students with low reading comprehension ability. There are significant differences in the perceived use of Global-reading strategies between students with low reading comprehension ability and students with intermediate reading comprehension ability, and between students with low reading comprehension ability and students with high reading comprehension ability. No significant difference exists in the perceived use of Problem-solving strategies and Supporting strategies. There also exist significant differences in the perceived use of ten specific reading strategies among students with different reading ability. Three of them fall into Problem-solving strategies, four of them falls into Global reading strategies and3of them into Supporting reading strategies.Students’general metacognitive awareness of overall reading strategies is weakly correlated with reading comprehension ability The correlation coefficients between students’reading comprehension ability and metacognitive awareness of each categories of reading ability indicate that there is a positive correlation between students’reading comprehension ability and their metacognitive awareness of reading strategies.At last, implications of the results for teachers in English language teaching (ELT) and for students in English learning are presented. Suggestions for further depth-in study are also presented.