Role Of Metacognitive Strategies In Reading And Their Application In Foreign Language Teaching

Metacognition is generally defined as "any knowledge and cognition regulation to the ongoing activities". Its essence is the cognition of cognitive activities themselves. It was put forward by American psychologist Flavell in 1970s when he was engaged in the study of metamemory. During the process of foreign language learning, a learner's metacognition refers to self-cognition and self-reflection in the process of learning a language. Because metacognition plays an important role in a learner's thinking activities and the deficiency of it may restrict the learner's intelligence and the ability of thinking, the improvement of metacognition can meaningfully contribute to the improvement of abilities in general. And at the same time, metaconition can reflect learner's advanced psychological activities as is demonstrated in the regulation and control of learning activities by self-reflective strategies, for it emphasizes learner's independence, activeness, self-regulation, responsibility and self-confidence in the process of learning.Reading comprehension is one of the important skills and one of the ultimate goals in foreign language learning. Reading, among other things, is a process of psycholinguistic activity. In this activity, the reader actively combines his or her knowledge or schema with the textual information in the process of planning, recognizing, guessing, inferring, proving, monitoring and evaluating etc. In this active process, strategies involved will affect the very process of reading comprehension, and the reader should intentionally regulate and control the reading process and adopt appropriate strategies to solve the problems during it. The traditional grammar-translation oriented teaching method for reading tends to overemphasize language form and overlook students' ability in language use. However, since the development of students' autonomy in learning is one ultimate goal of schooling, teachers should think over how to develop students' ability of independent learning. For this purpose, this paper discusses the nature and types of metacognition and its functions in education in general in relation to the theory and practice of reading, covering its nature, factors involved and some major models of readingcomprehension in the hope of exploring the possibility to integrate metacogniton training (including that on planning, monitoring, regulating and evaluating) into the development of college FL reading skills, especially for that of non-English majors.The dissertation tries to answer the following questions:Question 1: Whether metacognitive awareness (consciousness) and knowledge play a role in the performance of reading comprehension?Question 2: Whether metacognitive awareness (consciousness) and knowledge play an important part in the students' general English proficiency?Question 3: How do students perform in the reading comprehension when the reading items involve metacognitive factors?Question 4: Does metacognitive strategies training play an important role in the improvement of reading comprehension?To answer these questions, two reading tests and a questionnaire survey concerning metacognition were administered to 128 sophomores at East China Institute of Technology, and the data concerning the metacognitive level and students' reading ability were duly collected. All the data were keyed into SPSS VI 0.0 to analyze the statistics. The findings show that metacognition plays a significant role in reading comprehension and demonstrate some correlation with students' English proficiency. The experiment shows that the students' metacognitive knowledge and consciousness are relatively low—most students can only employ background knowledge to comprehend what they have read, and there is significant potential for further improvement with proper training, which is further supported by the author's empirical data which she collected in her own experience in integrating metacognitive skills with reading instruction.This research, like any similar attempts, cannot avoid its limitations in providing more convincing findings and undoubtedly leaves much room for improvement with further researches. The real value of metacognitive training should be furthersubstantiated and its applications shall be earnestly explored before it is regularly integrated into our curriculum for FL education.