An Action Research On Metacognitive Strategies To Improve Senior High School Students’ English Writing Ability

The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)clearly proposes that high school students should have the ability to create new discourses in writing from using the linguistic and cultural knowledge they have learned.However,based on relevant literature reviews and the current situation of writing teaching,problems such as poor planning and monitoring,insufficient evaluation in the process of English writing have been widely found among high school students.In view of this,the author conducted a survey on the students’ writing ability and strategy application in the teaching practice school.By identifying the problems and focusing on metacognitive strategies,the author carried out two stages of action research to improve their writing ability.The specific research questions in this action research are as follows:(1)How is the English writing ability of senior high school students before action research?(2)What is the nature of these students’ metacognitive knowledge before action research?(3)Does metacognitive knowledge have any significant effect on the improvement of the students’ writing performance after action research? If so,what dimensions do they embody?The author taught writing in action research and divided it into two stages.In the first stage,students were trained in the application of metacognitive strategies in English writing from three dimensions: planning,monitoring and evaluation.At the end of the first stage,according to students’ interviews,the plan of the second stage was adjusted and revised.The second stage of action research adopted the way of overall training of metacognitive strategy.This action research data collection mainly adopted a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods,mainly from questionnaires,interviews,time-limited writing tests,learning contracts,and metacognitive strategy writing records.The conclusions of this action research are as follows:(1)Before action research,students’ writing ability is weak.The average score of writing achievement is only 11.19,and the score of boys is significantly lower than that of girls(t=-3.548).(2)Students seldom apply metacognitive strategies in English writing before action research.Prior to participation,both the total mean of strategy(2.25)and the mean of all dimensions of strategy(planning strategy 2.31,monitoring strategy 2.47,evaluation strategy 1.96)are below 2.50.(3)Metacognitive strategies can improve students’ English writing ability(r=0.591**),which is mainly reflected in five dimensions: writing achievement(t=-4.926),lexical richness,sentence length distribution,clause density and article length.The findings of this study have some implications for senior high school English writing teaching in the context of core literacy.Teachers need to renew their concepts of English writing teaching,incorporate metacognitive strategy training into the regular writing teaching,and attach importance to the role of teachers in guiding and supervising learners’ output ability.To some extent,students should have the ability to use metacognitive strategies to improve their writing ability.This action research basically achieves the expected goal,but there are also some shortcomings,such as fewer samples and shorter research cycle.Therefore,the long-term impact of metacognitive strategies on students’ writing ability at different levels needs to be further explored.