A Correlational Study Of Junior Middle School English Learners' Metacognitive Reading Strategies And Reading Achievements

At the end of 1970 s,psychologist Flavell put forward the concept of metacognition.Since then,a great number of language researchers have paid attention to this theory.These researchers have improved the concept of metacognition and other related theories and experimental researches.Meanwhile,some researchers paid more attention to metacognition in reading comprehension.Due to the existing correlational researches,the research subjects foreign scholars take are extremely different from those of the domestic scholars.The big differences arise from the students' learning environment and cultural background they live,and also exist in the distance between the mother tongue and the target language.The above-mentioned factors will affect the learners' use of reading strategies,thus the results from foreign researches may not be completely applicable to the actual situation of students in our country.However,most of the researches at home employ the college or university students as the research subjects.Researches on reading strategies in junior middle school students are very limited.Both the age of the English learners in university,high school and junior high school and level of language learning are different,and there naturally exist differences in the use of strategies.The author chooses the junior middle school students as the research subjects to carry on the empirical study of the English reading strategies.Therefore,this research is designed to find answers to the following research questions: 1.What is the current situation of English learners' metacognitive reading strategies in English reading? 2.Is there any correlation between English learners' metacognitive reading strategies and reading achievements?The research is about the current situation of metacognitive strategy use in reading and the relationship between metacognitive reading strategy and reading achievements.The subjects in the present study are from two natural classes,Grade Eight,at No.5 Middle School of Tang County in Hebei province with a total number of 130.Questionnaire and interview were employed in this research.The experiment was firstly carried out with a questionnaire,including four sub-categories of planning,selective attention,monitoring and evaluation,to find out the application of metacognitive reading strategies in junior middle school.SPSS software was used to make descriptive and correlational analyses of the data.And results of the questionnaire show that metacognitive reading strategies use in junior middle students is in the medium level and it significantly correlates with the reading achievement.A follow-up semi-structured interview was conducted with ten students chosen as the interviewees.It shows that the English learners with high scores,who benifit from frequently employing metacognitive reading strategies,are better than that with low scores in all three aspects: metacognitive knowledge,metacognitive experience and metacognive supervision.Hence,it is found that Junior middle school English learners' use of metacognitive reading strategies significantly correlates with their reading achievements.