Experimental Study Of Metacognitive Strategies' Training Effects On Teaching English Vocabulary In Vocational School

For English learners,it is very important to learn English vocabulary effectively.Without vocabularies,we can not express anything.In fact,the number of vocabularies in some degree can decide on your level of English.Therefore,we should pay more attention to vocabulary teaching.How to make students learn vocabulary autonomously and efficiently has become a main study on teaching vocabulary.In recent years,especially since 1970s,researchers both at home and abroad have done a lot of studies on vocabulary learning strategy.Metacognitive strategies have proved to accelerate students to learn knowledge by themselves,improve independent learning ability and advance learning efficiency.Among all the learning strategies,metacognitive strategies are executive strategies which contains consciously plan,monitor,manage and evaluate a learning process.In the existing studies,researches on metacognitive strategies in language learning seldom focus on vocational school students.Therefore,we do an experimental study find metacognitive strategies' effects on English vocabulary learning for vocational college students.The theoretical foundation of this research is based on the concept and classification of metacognitive strategies by O'Malley and Chamot(1990),in which metacognitive strategies are thought to be higher-level strategies that can help students to improve their ability of planning,monitor,and evaluating their learning process.With this theoretical framework,three categories of metacognitive strategies(planning,monitoring and evaluating)will be mainly studied in vocabulary learning.This thesis reports a14-week metacognitive vocabulary learning strategy training.The subjects of the study are 58 non-English major students,who are in the experimental class(EC)and another 59 students in the control class(CC)in Dalian Computer Vocational School.The teacher first conducted a vocabulary metacognitive strategy questionnaire before the training and made an interview to look into the students' use of metacognitive strategies in vocabulary learning.In order to find out students'vocabulary performance,a pre-test was also used.With the data collected and analyzed,the metacognitive strategy training in vocabulary learning was carried out.After the training,the same questionnaire and a post-test were conducted to check the effects of the metacognitive strategy training use and vocabulary performance.With the help of SPSS 16.0,all the data was collected and analyzed.Besides these,data from learning reports and the interview was qualitatively analyzed.The results of the study shows that the metacognitive strategy training is necessary and dose make a significantly long and positive effect on the vocabulary learning of non-English majors of vocational school.Besides,the training is effective in the promotion of students' autonomous learning in the language learning process.