On Metacognition And English Reading Among Chinese Non-English Majors

Due to the importance of reading of all the basic foreign language skills, how to improve students' English reading proficiency has long been a common concern of researchers and English teachers. Metacognition, which is called "cognition about cognition, knowing about knowing" is one's awareness and regulation of his cognition. Reading is considered as an activity not only involving cognition, but also metacognition. Students' metacognitive awareness is positively correlated with their study performance and reading performance, students with high metacognitive awareness perform better than students with low metacognitive awareness in learning and reading. There are lots of studies on metacognition training in first language reading abroad, whereas there are not many studies on metacognition training in foreign language reading, and studies on metacognition in China focus on theory introduction and description. Based on the above points, this thesis intends to discuss whether metacognitive awareness training in reading courses is more effective than the conventional reading teaching method (text presentation with explanation of difficult words, sentences, structures, and translation of difficult sentences) in improving the non-English majors' reading achievement.The author of this thesis did a research, and in the current study, the subjects (about 84 junior students) were chosen from two intact classes (Class One was randomly assigned as the controlled class, Class Two as the experimental class) in Computer Science College of Changchun University...