The Application Of Meta-cognitive Strategies To English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are four major parts of English teaching,and all of them play an essential role in English learning.However,much attention is attached to reading.For the sake of high scores,some teachers also make a point of writing,but they just emphasize the memory of language forms,good words and some special sentence patterns,and leave little time on writing class.Few of them really teach students how to write,and the students have no interest in writing.As an output of learning,writing checks the comprehensive language ability.With no feasible methods and proper guidance,many students think writing is the most difficult part and accordingly lose confidence and interest in it.What's worse,some students just give up in writing.The New English Curriculum Standards requires that teachers should cultivate students' abilities of autonomous learning and abilities of thinking and solving problems and should help students form effective learning strategies.As one of the most important learning strategies,meta-cognitive strategies are of great significance for students to learn autonomously and regulate their studies independently,which can help students to become the master of their study.Teaching students how to learn is more important than teaching them knowledge,which totally accords with the popular trend of lifelong learning.The concept of meta-cognition,which is of great importance to cognitive science,is firstly proposed by Flavell,a psychologist of America in 1970.Flavell(1981)defines meta-cognitive strategies as a kind of knowledge which can reflect and regulate the whole cognitive activity or a kind of cognitive activity.And it consists of planning strategies,monitoring strategies and evaluation strategies.Wen Qiufang,a famous scholar in studies of English teaching in China,classifies meta-cognitive strategies as a kind of effective learning strategies.All in all,as an important part of meta-cognition and learning strategies,the importance of meta-cognitive strategies is obvious.Up to now,some scholars have done some theoretical studies on meta-cognitive strategies in English writing teaching,testifying that meta-cognitive strategies can improve English writing teaching.And some teachers have done real practice in English writing teaching in college with training of meta-cognitive strategies,proving that training of meta-cognitive strategies has a positive relation with students' writing levels.Therefore,the author thinks it is effective to apply meta-cognitive strategies in English writing teaching in senior high school.And the author puts forwardwith the following questions: 1)How can meta-cognitive strategies make a difference in students' attitude to English writing? 2)What is the relationship between meta-cognitive strategies and students' writing levels?To answer the questions above,the author chose two classes from the practice school to conduct an experiment.And Class One was the experimental class(EC).Class Two was the control class(CC).All of the students were high school freshmen.Before the experiment,students in the two classes were required to take a pre-test.By comparing the results of the two class,the author found that there were no significant differences in students' writing levels of the two classes.Then the author did a survey by questionnaires and interviews.The results showed that students of the two classes used little meta-cognitive strategies in English writing.And most of the students held negative attitude to English writing.Then the author started the teaching experiment with a training of writing strategies and meta-cognitive strategies in EC.Next,the author guided students of the EC to apply meta-cognitive strategies in English writing,and in the CC the author adopted the traditional writing teaching method.At the end of the experiment,the author tested the writing levels,the use condition of meta-cognitive strategies and learning attitude of the two classes.After the analysis of the results with help of SPSS 20,the author found that there were significant differences in the results between the two classes.And the writing mean scores were increased by more than 6 points in the EC,while there were no significant improvement in that of the CC.Besides,according to the interviews and questionnaires,the students in the EC obviously used the meta-cognitive strategies more frequently than before the experiment,while the students in the EC still did not use much of the meta-cognitive strategies.And the students in the EC became more active and interested in English writing class and they stated that they need the instruction of meta-cognitive strategies.After the analysis of the results,we can conclude as follows: 1)Meta-cognitive strategies can make a positive difference in students' attitude to English writing 2)Meta-cognitive strategies can help to improve students' writing levels.Because of the author' limited time and capacity and other objective variables,there were still some deficiencies in this study.Therefore,the author offered some suggestions for the future studies according to the experiment and realities.