| Recently, as a special group, the senior art students take up an increasing proportion in the number of students who take the college entrance examination. However, surveys show the acceptance rate of the art students does not go up. The poor performance in their academic subjects is responsible for most art students’ failure in their college entrance examination. And, among the academic subjects, English is always the poorest subject. Troubled by this problem, the schools which have many art students and English teachers who teach art students begin to seek for the efficient way to improve their students’ English. It is in this background that the study is carried out. Students involved in the study are from NO.3 senior school of Taikang, Zhoukou, where the majority of the students major in music, art, performance and so on. Based on the researcher’ teaching practice, a conclusion is drawn that vocabulary learning is a real problem for the art students. The small vocabulary accounts for their poor performance in English. Vocabulary, as one of the three elements of language, is a precondition for learning English well. So far, a number of studies on English vocabulary teaching and learning have been made; many findings have been obtained. However, among the studies, only a small part of them are on the application of metacognitive strategies in the vocabulary teaching of senior high school students. Studies taking senior art students as research subjects are much fewer.Therefore, on the ground of the knowledge of metacognitive strategies and former studies of the application of metacognitive strategies in the English vocabulary teaching, the study is performed, aiming to find out whether the training of metacognitive strategies can help the senior art students with their vocabulary learning and development of autonomic learning, who feature low English proficiency, bad learning habit, lacking the ability of self-management and self-control and have to spend much time on the art.The study is based on O’Malley and Chamot’s definition of metacognitive strategies and the classification of metacognitive strategies. According to O’Malley and Chamot’s theory, metacognitive strategies are high level executive skills. They refer to the planning, monitoring and adjustment that cognitive agent makes for the cognitive process. Questionnaire, vocabulary test and interview are the research instruments. Research subjects are two classes of Grade Two, and the students are all art ones. There are one hundred and seventeen students involved in it. One of the two classes is the experimental class, and the other one is the control class. The two classes are all taught by the teacher who carries out the study. The study is intended to give answers to the following three questions:1) Can the training of metacognitive strategies result in the change of senior artstudents’ opinion of vocabulary learning?2) Does the training succeed in promoting art students’ ability of vocabulary learning?3) Can the students become more autonomic in their vocabulary learning by thetraining?The whole training lasts fourteen weeks. Cognitive learning strategies are introduced to students in the two classes in the first three weeks of the study. But, from the fourth week, only students in the experimental class receive the training of metacognitive strategies. The training follows Cohen’s second language training model. The model emphasizes students’ participant in the training process. And, the training model can be used in three different ways. The study adopts the third one, which is to involve the strategies training into the routine vocabulary teaching. The whole training is divided into five stages. They are: preparation; presentation; practice; consolidation; evaluation. The training contents are training of self-planning, selective attention, self-monitoring and self-evaluation. The data from the questionnaire and the two vocabulary tests are analyzed by using Excel. The data show that after the training, the experimental class makes progress in the mean of each of the trained four metacognitive strategies. Each of the mean is above three. The standard deviation decreases. These imply students are equipped with the knowledge of metacognitive strategies and have the ability to use the strategies when learning vocabulary. Besides, the average score of vocabulary test rises from 22.96 to 31.5. However, for the control class, there is no significant difference between the mean of metacognitive strategies; average scores of two vocabulary tests do not change a lot. Apart from the quantitative analysis of the collected data, qualitative analysis of interview reports, which are from three students of the experimental class, is made.The study indicates: 1) the training of metacognitive strategies changes art students’ opinion of vocabulary learning and enhances students’ confidence and interest in English learning; 2) the training of metacognitive strategies can improve art students’ vocabulary learning efficiency; 3) the training of metacognitive strategies helps art students to develop their ability of vocabulary autonomic learning. In addition, because many discussions are organized among the whole class or the group members, these students’ cooperative consciousness is enhanced, and the relationship between the teacher and students is more harmonious.Therefore, teachers should involve the metacognitive strategies into their routine vocabulary teaching, which can help art students pass the college entrance examination and benefit them forever. |
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