A Study On The Correlation Between Metalinguistic Awareness And English Reading Competence Of Junior High School Students

English reading competence is not only the basis of English learning but also one of the essential skills required by the English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education.English reading is a complicated process that involves the integration of various cognitive skills and different kinds of knowledge.This logically implies that improvement of English reading competence is likely to be the result of acquisition of skills and knowledge,including the reader’s knowledge on lexical,structural(syntactic)and phonological conventions and their prior knowledge.Metalinguistic awareness(MLA)refers to the ability to reflect on and manipulate the structural features of languages.According to Nagy and Anderson(1995),learning to read is fundamentally metalinguistic.Therefore,it is of practical significance to promote English reading competence through metalinguistic awareness.The existing literature on the correlation between metalinguistic awareness and English reading competence mainly focuses on single dimension of metalinguistic awareness,lacking systematic and multidimensional studies of MLA.Furthermore,there is much literature concerned with primary school students and college students rather than junior high school students.Since junior high school students are at the critical stage of language learning,exploring the correlation between metalinguistic awareness and English reading competence of junior high school students attracts the increasing attention of many researchers.Two research questions are to be addressed in the study:(1)What is the general situation of junior high school students’ metalinguistic awareness?Are there differences in metalinguistic awareness among junior high school students of different grades?(2)What’s the correlation between junior high school students’ metalinguistic awareness and their English reading competence? And can students’ metalinguistic awareness predict their English reading competence?In this study,215 junior high school students from Jinan Yuhua Middle School and the Sixth Middle School of Licheng District of Jinan are involved.The tests as well as a semi-structured interview,are employed as the research instruments to collect data.SPSS 24.0 is adopted to analyze the data obtained from the tests and the semi-structured interview.Major findings are presented as follows:(1)Junior high school participants have a lower level of metalinguistic awareness.Among the three dimensions of metalinguistic awareness,word awareness is much lower than the intermediate level.Besides,it is also found that there are statistically significant grade differences in word awareness and syntactic awareness.(2)Pearson correlation analysis shows that metalinguistic awareness and English reading competence of junior high school students are correlated positively.Among the three dimensions,syntactic awareness is most relevant to English reading competence;Moreover,the regression analysis shows that metalinguistic awareness is a predictive variable of junior high school students’ English reading competence.And syntactic awareness and word awareness show a strong predictive validity on English reading competence.Based on the findings,some suggestions for improving junior high school students’ English reading competence are offered from the perspective of metalinguistic awareness.Finally,the limitations of this study and suggestions for future are elaborated.