A Case Study On The Use Of Metacognitive Strategies In English Reading By Senior High School Students Based On Aloud Thinking

Reading is an important means of cultivating English learners' English thinking ability and is also one of the important ways for them to acquire information.Even high school learners would use,in the reading process,particular strategies,including meta-cognitive strategies,cognitive strategies,social affective strategies,etc.Among them,meta-cognitive strategy is the most important factor that affects the students' reading ability.At present,however,our high school English teachers and researchers,who have paid much attention to the cultivation of students' meta-cognitive reading strategies,have failed in understanding what strategies their students use in general while reading.Thus,their negligence of giving timely training to their students might have seriously affected the latter's effective use of meta-cognitive strategies while reading and improvement of their reading ability.Accordingly,it is highly necessary to investigate high school students' application of meta-cognitive strategies in English reading process and the function on their reading performance.This study,guided by theories of the input hypothesis and information processing model,chose 14 high school students from Grade Three in XX city high school of Shandong province as objects and adopted the methods of thinking aloud and interview.The study,first of all,gave the objects two week's training and one week's testing,then conducted transcription of the recordings in the process of thinking aloud and interviews,and finally analyzed the data in a quantitative way by using SPSS(24.0)and in a qualitative way by inductive analysis,attempting to answer the following three questions:(1)What English meta-cognitive strategies are usually used by high school students in the process of English reading? What is the relationship between the use of these meta-cognitive strategies and their English reading ability?(2)What are the individual differences in the use of meta-cognitive strategies in English reading among senior high school students?(3)What are the factors that have influenced high school students' use of meta-cognitive reading strategies?The results of this study showed that:(1)High school students would use all four categories of meta-cognitive reading strategies in English reading activities,and the use of them is helpful in promoting the students' reading achievement.(2)There were significant individual differences among high school students of different levels in terms of using meta-cognitive strategies in English reading in that the high-level group would used meta-cognitive strategies more frequently,and particularly more flexible and effective than the low-level group.(3)There were two main factors that affected the use of meta-cognitive strategies in the two groups of students.One was of students' own language proficiency and reading habits,and the other was of theteachers' teaching methods.Based on these findings,the study suggested that high school teachers should teach meta-cognitive strategies consciously in reading classes so as to help their students in controlling meta-cognitive strategies and enhance their reading ability.There,of course,existed some deficiencies in the research due to the limitation of time and condition,such as the number of the subjects in the survey was small,and the results were not authoritative enough.But,generally speaking,the study has basically achieved its expected goals in that it has fully exhibited the overall situation of high school students' use of met-cognitive strategies and has further confirmed the positive relationship between students' use of meta-cognitive strategies and their English reading performance.The result has showed to high school students the significance of effective use of meta-cognitive strategies,and at the same time,it could also provide some constructive suggestions for high school English teachers to improve their ways of English reading instruction.