Metacognitive Strategies Towards The Cultivation Of English Autonomous Learning Ability For Senior High School Students

The student-centered education reform movement in the1960s made scholars shift theresearch focus from how to teach to how to learn, which emphasized the importance of learner’sindividual differences. Meanwhile, along with the further reform of domestic high school Englishcurriculum, the cultivation of autonomous learning ability has become a hot topic in the field ofhigh school English education. However, the normal problem existing among the high schoolstudents is that the students’ autonomous learning ability is low and their individual differences arelarge, so, the instruction and training on learning method and learning strategy seem to be veryessential and necessary.Autonomous learning ability refers to students’ ability of adjusting the learning process bytheir own, and as one of the important learning strategies, metacognitive strategy means thatlearners can process the information, plan and monitor learning process effectively, and adjust andevaluate learning results. Metacognitive strategy is considered as a higher level learning strategyamong all the learning strategies, which plays an important part in the cultivation of high schoolstudents’ autonomous learning ability.The study takes the86students of two classes randomly selected from Senior Grade2inNo.56Middle School of Da Qing as subjects. The class with44students was chosen asExperimental Class, and the other class with42was Control Class. The training lasted for onesemester. Before the training, the author carried out a test, two questionnaires and interviews to geta general idea about the students’ level of metacognition and autonomous learning ability, and then,formulated training plan according to the actual situation and undertook the metacognitive strategytraining. The training was carried out according to five steps in turn, mainly aiming at cultivatingstudents’ ability of formulating learning plan, monitoring learning process and evaluating learningresults. After the training, according to the data analysis, the author found that the autonomouslearning ability and the students’ English marks in Experimental Class are obviously better thanthat of Control Class. Therefore, the conclusion can be made that metacognitive strategy trainingcould improve high school students’ autonomous learning ability and English marks effectively.