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

As one of the four basic language skills,reading occupies a very important position in high school English teaching,helping people understand and obtain information and the world.At the same time,students are required to have higher comprehensive English ability.And there is a large proportion about reading in college entrance English examination.It is also a complex correspondingly part.Through the researches of scholars at home and abroad,as a kind of learning strategy,the metacognitive strategy plays a unique role and helps students plan,monitor,adjust and evaluate their learning processes actively,as well as effectively carry out self-management.Students can carry out self-management and reflection in order to improve themselves.This action research aims to improve student’s reading ability by training student’s metacognitive strategies in English reading teaching.The research tools are questionnaires,interview questions and a reading plan log.The research is divided into two stages:the first stage is training students to read from four aspects including planning strategy,selective attention strategy,monitoring strategy and evaluation strategy to improve their English reading ability.In the second stage,the action research is adjusted further according to the content of students’ interviews.Teachers should guide students to select appropriate metacognitive strategies scientifically and improve their English reading ability.The subjects of this action research are sophomores of a private high school in Huaibei City,Anhui Province.It is found that the reading ability of students is lack based on the examination,the questionnaire of the reading status and the metacognitive strategies of English reading.The students hardly use metacognitive strategies in reading.(section 1 of Chapter 4 for detailed data analysis).This action research adopts the method of training students’ metacognitive strategies to improve students’ reading ability and to solve the problems faced by the students.The questions of this action research are as follows:(1)What are the current situations of reading and the problems in English reading?(2)What are the students’ status of metacognitive strategies?(3)Is the application of metacognitive strategy helpful to improve the English reading ability of students?The method of data collection is the combination of quantitative and qualitative,and results of the research are as follows:The average score of the students’ reading tests is lower than the whole average score of the examination questions on the basis of the quantitative data analysis results of the reading examination and the "senior high school students’ English reading current situation questionnaire" in the beginning.And students have troubles in grammar,text,cultural background and so on.It can be indicated that the current situation of the students’ reading ability is not satisfactory.Through the analysis of the questionnaire on metacognitive strategies in senior high school students’ English reading,it is found that the average scores of planning strategy,selective attention strategy,monitoring strategy and evaluation strategy are 3.38,3.45,3.36 and 3.21 respectively.It can be seen that the students have weak awareness of metacognitive strategies,and they don’t use these strategies frequently.By analysing post-tests of the questionnaire on metacognitive strategies and reading,we can conclude that the reading scores of the students have been improved to a certain extent after this action research.After 16 weeks of training,the students have mastered some metacognitive strategies.According to the qualitative data analysis of the reading plan log,the four sub-strategies of metacognitive strategy are improved,and students are better at using planning strategy.It is also found that students’ basic knowledge of English language points is weak.Because the time of this action research is short and the sample sizes are smaller,the conclusion is only limited to the students of this class,and it is not general.In addition,the theoretical knowledge of metacognitive strategies,the ability to analyze problems and the level of research need to be further improved.At the same the time,the researcher lacks relatively the practical basis of the action research,and the research programme is not perfect enough.It is necessary to study the action research in the future practical teaching,continue to learn to use SPSS and improve the ability of data analysis and processing.And I need to observe the English classes of excellent teachers and learn from students and teachers modestly to perfect the teaching process and research ability.