| Oral English plays a more direct and extensive communicative role than that of written language.Therefore,it is an important task for English teachers to cultivate the students’ oral English ability.In recent years,the studies on the training of learning strategies to improve learners’ oral English ability has been deepening,among which the use of metacognitive strategy has become one of the research hotspots.On the basis of previous studies at home and abroad,the current study adopts a systematic microgenetic approach in exploring the development paths of the high school students’ oral English ability by using change-point analysis.Based on input hypothesis,noticing hypothesis and complex dynamic system theory,this study explored the effects of metacognitive strategy training on high school students’ oral English ability by using change-point analysis.The following three research questions were discussed in this study: 1)Can metacognitive strategy training significantly improve high school students’ oral English ability? 2)What are the differences in the development paths of the students’ oral English ability between the experimental class and the control class in the process of oral English learning? 3)What are the differences among the effects of metacognitive strategy training on the high school students with high,medium and low oral performances? In order to answer these questions,a seventeen-week oral English teaching experiment was conducted by taking two parallel classes in grade two of a provincial demonstrative high school in Gansu province as the research subjects.And Change-Point Analyzer and seventeen TEOFL speaking tasks were taken as the main research instruments.The research procedures of the present study consists three main parts,which were pre-training,training and post-training stages.In the seventeen-week oral teaching process of the experimental class,the teacher implemented metacognitive strategy training throughout the whole process.The control class adopted the traditional oral English teaching method in the same time by using the same teaching materials.Two classes had pre-tests before the experiment in the pre-training stage.During the experiment,the weekly oral English scores of the two classes were collected.After the experiment,that is the post-training stage,the two classes had post-tests.During the whole research process,weekly oral English scores of students in two classes were tracked,and SPSS 25 and Change-Point Analyzer were used to analyze the different development paths of high school students’ oral English ability.Through the analysis of the data,the results showed that: 1)Metacognitive strategy training can significantly improve high school students’ oral English ability.2)There are three differences in the development paths of students’ oral English ability between the experimental class and the control class,including the difference of students’ critical period of improvement of oral English ability;different degrees of improvement in different critical periods of improvement;and the timing difference of entering the “repeller state” and “attractor state”.3)Metacognitive strategy training has three different effects on the students with high,medium and low oral English performances,including the high and medium level students’ time and degree of the occurring of critical improving period is prior to that of the low level students;metacognitive strategy training had the best effect on medium-level students,followed by high-level and low-level students;the development path of oral English ability of medium-level students was the most stable one among three groups.This study explored the effects of metacognitive strategy training on high school students’ oral English ability and provided implications for both teachers and students.However,there were some limitations in this study and the author also put forward some suggestions for follow-up studies. |
