Effects Of Metacognitive Strategies And Working Memory Capacity Training On English Reading Comprehension Of Junior High School Students

In actual English teaching,reading is one of the difficulties in the teaching process of most English teachers.With the increasing knowledge of students and the pursuit of learning efficiency,the needs of teachers and students for reading strategies are also imminent.Many related studies have appeared in the fields of education and psychology,including positive relationships between metacognitive strategies and working memory capacity for English reading.This paper aims to explore the effects of metacognitive strategy training and working memory capacity training in the classroom for junior high school students on English reading.Through interviews,students’ true feelings can be derived.This study is based on Constructivism,Resource-sharing hypothesis,Task-switching hypothesis and Information-processing theory,using questionnaires,reading tests,working memory capacity tests and interviews as the research instruments.Two research questions are proposed based on the research aim:(1)What are the effects of metacognitive strategy training,working memory capacity training,and metacognitive strategy plus working memory capacity training on junior high school students’ English reading comprehension ability?(2)What are junior high school students’ perceptions on metacognitive strategy training,working memory capacity training and metacognitive strategy plus working memory capacity training? A total of 121 students from three parallel classes in the eighth grade of a middle school in Xi’an,Shaanxi Province,were randomly divided into three experimental classes according to their pre-test reading scores.Including metacognitive strategy training class,working memory capacity training class,metacognitive strategy plus working memory capacity training class.After 12 weeks of training,metacognitive strategy and working memory capacity were tested in three classes before and after training to compare the effectiveness of training,a6 students from each of the three experimental classes were randomly selected for interviews to understand students’ views on training activities.Using SPSS 25.0 to analyze the experimental data and summarize the interview results.First,the results of one-way ANOVA show that metacognitive strategies,working memory capacity,metacognitive strategies plus working memory capacity have significant effects on English reading comprehension of junior high school students;the results of paired sample T-test analysis of the three classes shows that these three classes’ post-training results are higher than their pre-training results,so it can be proved that all three groups of training have a positive effect on students’ reading comprehension.In addition,the effects of metacognitive strategy plus working memory training and metacognitive strategy training on students’ English reading comprehension were significantly higher than those on working memory capacity training.Second,the interview results show that although some students think that it is difficult to participate in the whole classroom training,most students love to participate in training activities,while the students of metacognitive strategy plus working memory training class and metacognitive strategy class have higher enthusiasm and participation of classroom training than those of working memory training class.All in all,this study basically achieves the expected goal,and the simultaneous training of metacognitive strategy and working memory capacity in teaching not only improved students’ English reading ability,but also helped students’ ability to process cognitive information,and enriched the diversification of teachers’ classroom activities.Therefore,the writer believes that teachers would actively guide and encourage students to make full use of reading strategies and working memory training to help students enhance their English learning ability on their own and build a solid foundation for later work and study.