A Study On The Influence Of Meta-cognitive Strategy On The English Reading Ability Of Junior High School Students

As we all know, reading is one of the four basic skills, which are listening, speaking, reading and writing. As one of the most important information input carrier, reading plays an important role in learning English. Therefore, reading has been an important issue in language teaching and learning.The theory of meta-cognition is put forward by Flavell in the 1970 s. Meta-cognitive strategy stems from meta-cognition theory. The current study takes the junior high school students as participants. It mainly inquiries into the influence of meta-cognitive strategy on the English reading ability of junior high school students. The specific research questions are listed as follows:1. What is the situation of using meta-cognitive strategies for junior high school students in English reading? What changes are there in their use of meta-cognitive strategies after training?2. Can the training of meta-cognitive strategies have positive influence on the reading ability of junior high school students? If so, what’s the influence on the high-score group, the middle-score group and the low-score group respectively?In order to answer the research questions, three kinds of instruments are employed: questionnaire, examination and interview. The author conducts a 16 weeks’ meta-cognitive training in Laosiping Junior High School. The participants, which consist of 50 students in both EC and CC, are selected randomly from Grade Three. In order to guarantee the objective of the study, both of the two classes are taught by the same teacher and the same learning materials. During the experiment, EC is involved in a meta-cognitive training while CC follows the traditional classroom instruction. In the current study, the quantitative data are analyzed by SPSS 11.5 and the qualitative data are analyzed by the author. The conclusions are drawn as follows:1. During the reading process of junior high school students, the using frequency of selective attention strategy, monitoring strategy and planning strategy reaches the medium use level. The using frequency of evaluating strategy reaches the low use level. The using frequency is ranked in order of categories of meta-cognitive strategy from high to low as selective attention, monitoring, planning and evaluating. Students’ awareness of using meta-cognitive strategy improves after training. Among the four categories of meta-cognitive strategy, the using frequency of monitoring strategy and selective attention strategy improve obviously, ranking high use level. The using frequency of evaluating strategy improves from low level to medium level. The awareness of using planning strategy also promotes though its mean score still stays at medium use level.2. The meta-cognitive training does have a positive influence on reading ability of junior high school students. Compared with the high-score group, the middle-score group and the low-score group get more improvement. However, in the improvement of the reading scores, there is no evident difference between the middle-score group and the low-score group in statistics.In conclusion, students benefit a lot from the training of meta-cognitive strategy to improve their reading ability. Thus, the current study provides some enlightenments and references for both teaching and learning in junior high school.