An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Junior Middle School Students' English Learner Autonomy

Compulsory education,English curriculum standard made it clear that learning strategies consist of all kinds of actions and steps taken by students in order to learn and use English effectively.English learning strategies include cognitive strategies,control strategies,communicative strategies,resource strategies and so on.In the implementation of English class helping students to use learning strategies effectively is not only to help them establish learning goals,to adopt a scientific approach and to improve the learning efficiency,but also to help to foster their ability of autonomous learning and to lay the foundation for lifelong studies.As there are plenty of scholars having in-depth researches on learning strategies aboard and at home,a growing number of people gradually get interested in metacognitive strategy which is the most significant part of learning strategy.Wang Duqin(2002)believes that cultivating learners' metacognitive strategies is one of the vital ways to improve their autonomous learning ability.There are a great many researches about the theory and the definition of metacognitive strategy or applying metacognitive strategy to the specific part of second language acquisition(listening,speaking,reading and writing).Besides,most of the subjects are college students,high school students or higher vocational college students,and it is very rare to set junior middle school students as research subject.Therefore,this paper applies metacognitive strategy training to English teaching in a junior middle school,and adopts an empirical approach to investigate the effectiveness of metacognitive strategies training.This study discusses the following two questions: 1.What is the effect of metacognitive strategy training on students' learning achievements? 2.What is the effect of metacognitive strategy training on students' learning attitudes?On the basis of literature review,this study carries on an experimental study on the eighth grade in a junior middle school in Jingyu County of Jilin Province for a semester.There are 64 students totally in two classes,34 students are in the Class One(experimental class)and 30 students are in the Class Two(control class).According to the previous survey,there exists no significant difference between the experimental class and the control class.The main research methods are adopting English proficiency tests,questionnaire and follow-up interviews.During the experiment,students in the experiment class receive metacognitive training which mainly includes raising students' metacognitive awareness and learning about themselves,setting goals and making plans,monitoring learning process and evaluating learning performance,while the students in the control class are taught using the common English teaching method.In this study,SPSS 17.0 is used to analyze the data from tests andquestionnaire for quantitative analysis,including Independent-samples t-test and Paired samples t-test,while the follow-up interviews are used for qualitative analysis.The research results show that metacognitive strategy training can improve students' learning achievements and learning attitudes in different degrees.At last,general findings and limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are proposed.