Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Reading Teaching In High School

Reading ability is one of the most important skills to acquire information and learn new knowledge.The cultivation of reading ability has always been a major concern in foreign language teaching.In recent years,under the requirement of new National English Curriculum Standard,English test is continuous reforming.The most obvious part of reformation is the reading comprehension section.Whether in the design of the question style,or in the increase of the amount of questions,it has more and more reflected the importance of reading ability in English learning.It is not hard to see that reading comprehension becomes more and more essential in the exam,which accounts for a large proportion of the whole exam paper and draws out a deep gap among students in the whole test paper.However,students don't have enough time to read a great number of English materials and do enough reading comprehension practice.Both the increase of reading quantity and the improvement of reading ability did not meet the requirements of the new National English Curriculum Standard.What's more,they even do not know what reading strategies are.Therefore,their reading level is still below the average all over the country,which led to the poor performance of English examination in recent years.As a senior high school English teacher,the author is deeply worried about this situation.Therefore,the author wants to do some theoretical application research to help students find a good way to improve their reading scores quickly.In recent years,English learners have come to realize that reading strategies are important to achieve the success of reading.They think that cultivating students to read independently by using strategies is the most important way to improve their reading level,and use some strategies for reading can significantly improve the learners' interest in learning.According to recent researches,it is identified that metacognitive awareness plays a very important role in reading comprehension.Metacognitive strategies are knowledge of cognitive processes.It involves thinking about the learning process and how to make it more effective,planning for learning,monitoring during study period,and evaluating how successful the research is done.Therefore,in the process of English reading,students can use metacognitive strategies,including the planning strategy,monitoring strategy;adjust strategies to effectively guide them to read,to achieve the purpose of reading task.In this thesis,the author wants to put forwards three questions.It is listed as follows:1.What is the current situation in applying metacognitive strategies to English reading teaching in Bijie high school for minorities?2.How to apply metacognitive strategies in English reading comprehension classes in Bijie high school for minorities?3.Can the application of metacognitive strategies to English reading comprehension improve students' reading ability?The thesis based on the theory and researches about metacognitive strategies both at home and abroad.The author carried out an experiment in an ordinary high school in Bijie.In the experiment,reading training begins by applying metacognitive strategies to students' English reading comprehension.The 100 students participated in the research come from two different classes selected randomly in the same grade.Students are divided into two groups.One is the ordinary class(controlled class),and the other is the experimental class.The experimental class was trained by applying the Metacognitive Strategies to reading comprehension,while the other class was trained in the traditional teaching model at the same time.After training for a period of time,the author compared the all the participants' reading comprehension scores carefully.The results show that:(1)Both the teachers and students have little knowledge of the metacognitive strategies and even seldom applied it.(2)The students in experimental group improved their reading ability significantly after the conscious training,and the final result was much better than the control group.(3)The process and methods of teaching in class will have a great influence on the strategies application in reading comprehension.This thesis also puts forward countermeasures to help students use metacognitive strategies actively while reading.First of all,teachers and students should attach great importance to the application of metacognitive strategies in reading comprehension to guide reading.Second,in the daily teaching the teacher needs to spend a long time to take a systematic training for students and constantly cultivate students' awareness of using metacognitive strategies.Finally,the teacher plays an important role in the process of cultivating students' reading ability.Therefore,the training of learning strategies is not only aimed at students,but also deserves teachers' further study on how to train students effectively.The results of the above study have some implications for teaching of English reading comprehension in high school.At the same time,the data analysis of results shows that metacognitive strategies plays an important role in language learning and the learning methods have a direct influence on reading comprehension scores.Therefore,teachers must learn to apply metacognitive reading strategies to reading classes.Although the results of this study have the certain persuasiveness,however,due to the limited sample size,especially the survey data of teachers,the survey results lack universality.In addition,the interviews,questionnaires,and classroom observation are only conducted once,so some deficiencies need to be further improved.