An Experimental Study On Developing Metacognitive Strategies Of Senior High School Students Through Constructing English Learning Portfolios

Under the background of quality education and lifelong learning, developing students’ ability of autonomous learning has become an important part of the training goal of foreign language teaching. Metacognition, as knowledge of “thinking about thinking”, has a very important significance in improving the students’ learning efficiency and promoting autonomous learning. However, at present, students in senior high school have poor metacognitive strategies, which should be paid much attention to. Besides, cultivating middle school students’ metacognitive strategies and promoting their autonomous learning ability are the requirements of the English Curriculum Standard in our country. How to put the metacognitive strategies training into the real practice of English teaching, improving students’ learning consciousness of self-planning, self-monitoring and self-evaluating and guiding them to really take responsibility for their learning, has become an important problem of the present English teaching.Learning portfolio is a combination which shows each student’s efforts and progress they made in the learning process, as well as the reflection on learning achievements. Through the construction of learning portfolio, teachers can clearly observe the progress students make, urge students to check their homework regularly and reflect on their learning attitudes, methods and achievements, so as to help students to develop their learning autonomy and self-confidence. Thus it can be seen, these functions of the learning portfolio are consistent with the metacognitive strategies. Based on the previous researches, the author puts forward two research questions: Does the English learning portfolio improve students’ metacognitive strategies? Does the English learning portfolio have the same effect on the students of different levels?The research was conducted in a senior high school. The researcher chose two classes from Grade One as the subjects. The experiment lasted a whole semester. Both the qualitative and quantitative analyses are used as the research instruments. During the experiment, students in the experimental class received the teaching model that they build their English learning portfolios aimed at improving the metacognitive strategies with the teacher’s guidance, while the control class received normal instruction. The English learning portfolio is required to cover several sections, including learning plans, self-assessment sheets, reflective journals, errors sets and self-selected homework.A series of data collected from the questionnaire is processed by the software SPSS 13.0. The results of the post-test show that there exists significant difference between the experimental class and the control class in the metacognitive strategies application level. Students in experimental class make great progress in their metacognitive strategies application, while the control class still maintains the same level before and after the semester. After the training, students’ abilities of self-planning, self-monitoring and self-assessment are all improved greatly. Furthermore, the improvement extent of the weak students is larger than that of the top students and they gain more benefits from the English learning portfolios. The follow-up interview is conducted and students’ English learning portfolios are collected in order to obtain more evidence to verify the results. Both the qualitative and quantitative analyses indicate that students hold a positive attitude towards the English learning portfolios. They can take advantage of metacognitive strategies to guide their learning and become awareness of making learning plans, monitoring their learning process and reflecting on their learning methods. The research comes to a construction that the English learning portfolios is an effective means to the metacognitive strategies improvement.It is hoped that the thesis can offer some practical experience to the construction of English learning portfolios aimed at fostering metacognitive strategies, to provide a realistic and effective teaching model for the metacognitive strategies training.