Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy-based Instruction On Senior High School Students' Academic Achievements Of English Reading

The importance of reading cannot be overemphasized in China,which is one essential element of the four basic language skills known as "listening,speaking,reading and writing",and learning strategies are closely related to reading.After a careful revision of the previous related studies of English learning strategies in China for more than 30 years,we have found that despite the late beginning of the related studies in our country,it has made some achievements,thus promoting and contributing a lot to our foreign language education in China.The teaching of reading in high school is of great significance.However,while most teachers and students in China have consumed too much time and energy,the outcome of English learning is not satisfactory.In traditional teaching,English teachers relatively attach importance to the teaching of English knowledge,not to the cultivation and strengthening of reading strategies,especially metacognitive strategies."English Syllabus for High Schools(2017 edition)"clearly points out that "the training of learning strategies can help students to form a suitable learning style and learning methods,to improve students' autonomous learning ability,and to lay a good foundation for students' sustainable development and lifelong learning,in which the metacognitive strategy refers to the students' improvement of their English learning efficiency,namely planning,monitoring,evaluating,reflecting on and adjusting the learning process or learning outcomes(The Ministry of Education of People's Republic of China,2018).Therefore,this essay focuses on the effects of metacognitive strategy-based instruction on the high school students' academic achievements of English reading so as to find out an effective approach to improve their English reading comprehension.The main research questions are addressed as follows:(1)What are the characteristics of English metacognitive strategies used by students in a senior high school?(2)Can metacognitive strategy-based instruction improve students' English reading performance?If yes,to what extent?In this study,the experimental class and the control class were used to carry out the study.The experimental class received the metacognitive strategy-based instruction,the control class the normal organization of teaching.The author used the explicit metacognitive strategy teaching,and integrated metacognitive strategy teaching into the normal classroom teaching.At the end of the experiment,all the subjects took the same English test to find out the influence of the classroom teaching based on metacognitive strategy-based instruction on English reading academic achievements.After a careful study and analysis,the research findings are summarized as follows:(1)As the findings of this study show,the majority(75.3%)of the students do not fully understand the metacognitive strategies in reading.Metacognitive strategies used in reading in general are of low frequency(25.1%),among which the evaluation strategy after reading is the lowest(26.26%).Generally,the strategy of evaluation is rarely used(38.12%);Second to it,the strategy of planning before reading is rarely used(18.34%);The monitoring strategy in the reading is sometimes used,which is close to the medium level(50.16%).The findings of the study show that the students have some changes after metacognitive strategy teaching.Basically they can consciously plan the reading content,choose the reading strategy,adjust their reading behavior in time and evaluate their reading effect.(2)As the students receive metacognitive strategy teaching,the students'awareness of reading strategy can be enhanced,and the metacognitive strategies are more frequently used to guide their cognitive process.They consciously plan for reading,monitor the reading process,control their reading behavior and evaluate the reading comprehension results.The findings of the study show that mean difference of the experimental class is 2.9473 points higher than the control class.Therefore,the classroom teaching based on metacognitive strategy can improve the students' reading achievements after independent sample T-test.It is found that the significance is 0.003,in which the T-test of independent sample is 0.003,which shows that the metacognitive strategy-based teaching has improved the students' English reading achievements.That is to say,the English reading achievements of the two classes are significantly different.The English reading achievements of the experimental group are significantly higher than that of the control group.The findings of this study have a certain reference value for the English teaching in senior high schools.