Explore Collegians’ Natural Metamemory Abilities To Monitor And Control English Vocabulary Learning

Vocabulary is an essential prerequisite for language acquisition.However,learners encounter a variety of setbacks in the learning process.Therefore,increasing attention has been diverted to vocabulary learning,part of which has been informed by metamemory studies.Metamemory is comprised of two processes: monitoring and controlling.One kind of monitoring is feelings of knowing(FOK).Most previous studies addressed the mechanism(s)of FOK,but only a few compared the two major ones: the cue-familiarity and the target-accessibility.As for controlling,much previous research centered on comparing the effect of the allocation of study time on learning,a little focused on students’ allocation of study time in a classroom throughout a whole semester.Correspondingly,Experiments 1 and 2 are proposed.For the former,three research questions(RQs)are posed,namely: RQ1: How do familiarity with the whole word and accessing partial attributes of the whole word(affixes or roots,for example)affect subjects’ judgments of vocabulary mastery? RQ2: What metamemory biases exist in subjects’ monitoring of vocabulary mastery? For the latter,one research question is proposed,i.e.,RQ3: How do subjects allocate their study time to different degrees of mastery of English vocabulary? To address these questions,the thesis adopted a quantitative research design.The participants in Experiment 1 were 21 Shanghai collegians who were first required to write down fifty Chinese translations of bold English words,judge the chance of picking up the correct meaning in later multiplechoice questions,and indicate their judgments were based on which mechanism(s).Then they were asked to finish the multiple-choice questions.The participants in Experiment 2 were also Shanghai collegians.Due to the different participation rates in Experiment 2,the number of them varied in the pretest,five-unit tests,and post-test.All of them were first asked to finish the pretest about English vocabulary size,then complete five-unit tests,which were multiple-choice questions on vocabulary,indicating their certainty levels for each chosen question and their later allocation of study time for each level.The results concerning RQ1 demonstrated that there was a main effect with F(3,1046)= 183.29,p< 0.01.That is to say,there was a significant difference in the magnitude of FOK judgments based on different mechanisms.To further identify their order of magnitude,posthoc tests were employed.The calibration curves were adopted in RQ2 to reveal metamemory biases,when FOK judgments were between around 40%and 60 % and between around 80% and 85%,underconfidence(actual performance is better than prediction)was observed,and when FOK judgments between around 60%and 80%,overconfidence(actual performance is worse than prediction)emerged.The results of RQ3 also revealed a main effect for all five-unit tests,with F(2,282)= 29.86,p< 0.01,F(2,255)= 24.77,p< 0.01,F(2,246)= 21.57,p< 0.01,F(2,264)= 62.99,p< 0.01,F(2,237)= 53.58,p< 0.01 respectively.To further identify their order of magnitude,ANOVA was employed.Findings,discussion,and educational implications concerning how to boost the efficiency of English vocabulary learning through collegians’ natural metamemory abilities are quarried.