An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Senior High School Students' English Reading Abilities

Reading,as an important part of English study,plays an active part in English teaching system.During the process of English learning,reading is the main source to gain knowledge and information,which is an important way of language input.Students? reading comprehension ability is tightly connected with teaching quality,and improving students? reading ability is one of the main tasks of English teaching.However,during the English reading teaching process,teachers pay much attention to explaining vocabularies,phrases,sentence structures and grammar,and they seldom adopt reading strategy teaching method.They neglect the cultivation of students? autonomous learning ability and their strategy training.Based on metacognitive theory,this thesis compares metacognitive strategy training with traditional reading teaching method to study the effects of metacognitive strategy training on senior high school students? English reading abilities.There are three questions to be studied in the thesis:1)What?s the current situation of senior high school students? meta-cognitive strategy used in their reading process?2)Is there any improvement in meta-cognitive strategy use in experimental class after meta-cognitive strategy training?3)Can meta-cognitive strategies training improve the senior high school students' reading ability?In order to answer the three questions,the author did a 16 weeks? experiment in two parallel classes which are from a senior high school of Feng Cheng.The number of participants was 135.One class was randomly selected as the control class(CC)and the other as the experimental class(EC).Before experiment,the students of EC and CC were asked to finish the pre-test and metacognitive strategy questionnaire to investigate the current situation of their metacognitive strategy use and reading ability.Then metacognitive strategy training was applied in the experimental class while the control class was taught with the traditional reading teaching method.After one term?s training,the two classes participated the post-test.At the same time,the EC needed to answer the questionnaire again and 6 students were interviewed after post-test.The findings are as follows: 1.Before experiment,the EC?s and CC?s mean scores of metacognitive strategy were 2.26 and 2.39,which were at a low level.That is,metacognitive strategy(especially planning strategies and evaluation strategies)was not widely used in English reading among senior students.2.After experiment,the EC?s mean score of metacognitive strategy is 2.59,which was at a medium level.Besides,from the results of students? interview,it can be concluded that students? metacognitive level has been improved by training.3.After the experiment,there is a slight difference between EC?s(23.44)and CC?s(20.09)scores of post-test(p=.049<0.05).EC?s reading achievements have been improved while CC?s have no difference.Therefore,metacognitive strategies can improve students' English reading ability.Based on the findings,some implications for English reading teaching and learning are proposed as follows: firstly,teachers should change their traditional role into guides,assistors or facilitators.Secondly,teachers should try to widen their metacognitive awareness and professional skills.Thirdly,they should encourage students to use metacognitive strategy as well as help students to select appropriate metacognitive strategy and direct the students to use metacognitive strategy correctly.Last,teachers should design more activities and give students more chances to apply metacognitive strategy in reading practice.