The Effects Of Explicit Metacognitive Reading Strategy Instruction On Non-English-Major Postgraduates

Metacognition, as an important branch in cognitive psychology and educational psychology, has been employed to language teaching, including the teaching of reading. The application of metacognitive theory into practice has attracted many researchers'attention with the penetration of Chinese English teaching reform. Extended research has revealed that metacognitive reading strategy instruction could enhance reading comprehension ability; however, there seems to be no published research pertaining to Chinese non-English-major postgraduates about the effects of metacognitive reading strategy instruction. To deal with the current situation of limited class hours for non-English-major postgraduates in our university and their relatively low reading scores, explicit metacognitive reading strategy instruction has been provided to improve their reading ability.The explicit metacognitive reading strategy instruction in this study was based on metacognitive-based view on reading comprehension and interactive reading model, using metacognition as theoretical foundation and explicit strategy instruction as pedagogical foundation, following the five-stage instructional sequence of CALLA, referencing Wilhelm's six recursive steps of teaching metacognitive strategies. In addition, after-class reading assignments and reflective journals have been adopted to assist the strategy instruction. SPSS has been used to analyze questionnaires, pretest and posttest data to perform ANOVA, independent-samples t-tests, paired-samples t-tests and correlation analyses.The statistical analyses show that significant differences exist on metacognitive reading strategy awareness for all high-, medium-, and low-English-proficiency-level students between the experimental group and the control group, and the experimental group students have gained stronger sense of metacognitive reading strategy awareness than the corresponding students of the control group. The medium- and low-English-proficiency-level students'posttest reading comprehension section scores in the experimental group are significantly different from those of the control group with experimental group students achieving higher scores; but for high-English-proficiency-level students, such difference is not found. A strong positive correlation has been found between experimental group students'reported actual strategy usage and their reading scores. Significant differences exist for the medium- and low-English-proficiency-level students in the experimental group between their perceived metacognitive strategy usage and their reported actual strategy usage, and their perceived more strategy usage than their reported actual strategy usage; but for high-English-proficiency-level students, such a difference does not exist. Results of the above analyses show that explicit metacognitive reading strategy instruction effectively improved students'metacognitive reading strategy awareness, enhanced medium-, and low-English-proficiency level students'reading ability, and that actual strategy usage contributed to improved reading ability.The present study is the first to use non-English-major postgraduates as participants, and to investigate their current metacognitive reading strategy awareness. This study enriches the research of metacognitive reading strategy instruction in China. This is the first to investigate the effects of explicit metacognitive reading strategy instruction to non-English-major postgraduates in natural classroom settings, and it provides convincing evidence to support the English teaching reform for postgraduates in order to solve their current reading problems. This study is original in distinguishing between students'perceived metacognitive strategy usage and their reported actual strategy usage in metacognitive reading strategy research. Due to the significant differences between the two, it is really difficult for students to truly achieve automaticity in applying metacognitive reading strategies to actual English reading, and long-term metacognitive reading strategy instruction may be an effective solution.This dissertation provides a comprehensive theoretical expatiation on metacognition and metacognitive reading strategies. It investigates the effects of explicit metacognitive reading strategy instruction on non-English-major postgraduates'metacognitive reading strategy awareness and their English reading ability. Hopefully this research can serve as a practical reference for educators in postgraduate English reading instruction reform, curriculum design, teaching material compilation and teacher's training, etc.