A Correlative Study Of Meta-cognitive Strategies And English Writing Achiev Ement Of Senior High School Students

With a deeper research of learner-centered concept,English learning strategies attract increasing attention than ever before.Effective learning strategies have many merits that can improve learning quality and efficiency,develop student’s self-learning ability;and appropriate learning strategies can well explain and predict students’ academic performance(Lv,D.& Ma,R.2007).As a significant component of learning strategies,the theory of meta-cognitive strategieshas received great attention among scholars.In 1976,J.H.Flavell,a psychologist of America,firstlyputs forward the term “meta-cognition”.He defines it as one’s knowledge related to their own cognitive processes and products.Since then,a growing number of scholars have realized the importance of it and then take up the correlative research to guide foreign language teaching and learning.Domestic researches in this filed have made a rapid development since 1990s;however,researches on meta-cognitive strategies and English writing are relatively few compared with otheraspects,especially in senior high English writing.Based on this condition,this thesis will do a correlative research on meta-cognitive strategies and English writing achievement of senior high school students.The thesis mainly investigates the condition of meta-cognitive strategies use by students in Grade Two of Mudanjing No.2 Senior High School in HeiLongjiang province,and researches the relationship between the meta-cognitive strategies use and the variables ofsuccessful and unsuccessful writers.Students,who have a strong desire for cooperation,participate in the study as the research subjects,which can ensure the effective validity and credibility of investigation.As the research instrument,the questionnaire designed by Lu Wenjun is adopted in this research as the quantitative research method to investigate the situation of meta-cognitive strategies use,the writing score of mid-term examination is adopted as the measurement criteria to exam students’ writing achievement,and the interview is regarded as the supplementary method to check whether the students’ expression is consistent with questionnaire.Then the author uses the SPSS19.0 to deal with all the data to analyze the meta-cognitive strategies’ frequency of use;meanwhile,the T-test is conducted to examine the differences in the use of meta-cognitive strategies between successful and unsuccessful writers;finally,the Pearson correlation is appliedto examine the furtherrelationship between meta-cognitive strategies and English writing achievement to explore an effective model for writing.The results have shown that meta-cognitive strategies are used at the medium level in English writing in Mudanjiang No.2 Senior High School;the frequency of selective attention strategies is the highest while self-evaluation strategies is the lowest among four categories.Bycomparing the meta-cognitive strategiesusebetween successful and unsuccessful students,the author comes to the conclusion that students with higher scoresare more likely to use strategies than those with lower scores because the mean score of successful writers is 3.36 that is higher than 2.89 of unsuccessful writers;at the same time,the result of T-test shows the differencesof strategies use exist in the two groups of students.The findings from Pearsoncorrelation show that the theory of meta-cognitive strategies is positively correlated with the level of English writing;the self-monitoring strategies has a greatest impact on writing achievement,while self-evaluation strategies is on the contrary;the result reveals that training the students’ meta-cognitive awareness,especially the self-monitoring strategies,could enhance students’ English writing achievement.