An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Cooperative Learning On Metacognitive Strategies In Senior High School Students’ English Reading

For a long time,teachers take up most of the class time in classroom teaching,while students have few opportunities to participate in classroom activities and express their opinions.In recent years,a large number of studies have fully revealed the importance of cooperative learning in foreign language teaching.English teaching should be based on students’ learning effect,which largely depends on students’ subjective initiative and participation.In cooperative learning,students may monitor their learning process in order to make contributions to the group,thus better completing the group learning task.Metacognitive strategy is the behavior of readers to regulate the whole process of reading,and to set reading objectives by means of planning,monitoring and evaluating.Therefore,there may exist some relationships between cooperative leaning and metacognitive strategy.Meanwhile,there are few experts and scholars show concern about the effects of cooperative learning on senior high school students’ metacognitive strategies in English reading.This research combines cooperative learning with metacognitive strategy in reading,detecting whether the application of selective attention strategies and monitoring strategies makes a difference under the effect of cooperative learning.A three-month teaching experiment was conducted in a senior high school and two classes of senior two was selected as research subjects.There are 48 students in each class and the experimental class adopts the cooperative learning method for English reading.Meanwhile,the students in control class think independently instead of working together when they have to complete a reading task.In order to know what degree of metacognitive strategies students have achieved in experimental class and control class in English reading,a questionnaire is designed and used before and after the experiment.At the end of this research,an interview is arranged to find out how students’ attitude towards cooperative learning changes and whether they have the big enhancement in metacognitive strategies after cooperative learning.Through the experiment,it can be found out that the cooperative learning mode adopted by the experimental class is more effective.In terms of selective attention strategy,four kinds of sub-strategies have brought about changes.Firstly,students in experimental class can better connect the background information that they already have with the text to improve their understanding in reading.Secondly,the students have developed awareness of connecting the main points to improve their understanding of the text.Thirdly,they pay more attention to the structure and organization of the text.Fourthly,it is more likely for them to grasp the topic sentences of the paragraphs and use them to figure out the main idea of the passage.In addition,two subtypes of monitoring strategies also make a difference.Firstly,the students in experimental class can stop more to think and check whether they understand what they are reading.Secondly,they can better adjust their reading speed according to the reading time.This research confirms that cooperative learning can inspire students’ selective attention strategies and monitoring strategies in English reading,and provides pedagogical implications for reading teaching.