A Case Study On Metacognitive Strategies Promoting College English Students' Learning Autonomy

In recent years, the passiveness and dependence of non-English majors in their language learning have greatly hindered college English teaching in China. Training learners to be autonomous has become an important area of language research. Learner autonomy has been defined as the ability to take responsibility for one's own learning. In the special case of foreign language learning, learner autonomy entails the gradual development of a capacity for the independent and flexible use of the target language.Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is a higher-order executive skill which involves an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge to plan, monitor, and evaluate the learning process. Once having a good command of metacognitive strategies, learners are able to make plans according to their own situations, to select appropriate strategies, to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies use and to revise plans when necessary.So far, researches in second language learning strategies have affirmed the crucial role of metacognition in language learning, and the potential for greater use of metacognitive strategies. At present, many researches abroad have made researches on metacognitive strategy training in mother tongue and second language contexts. However, there haven't many relevant training studies in foreign language context. And in China, the studies on metacognitive strategies become common recently but more focus is paid onlearner's metacognitive descriptive investigations. Little has been reported about metacognitive-strategies-based instruction. Therefore, this thesis sets out to explore how to promote non-English majors' autonomy through metacognitive strategy training.108 subjects participated in the research with 60 subjects in the experimental class and 48 in the control class. The data were collected through questionnaires, language tests, interviews and diaries and analyzed with SPSS. Data analysis suggested that metacognitive level correlated with English achievement and that metacognitive strategy training not only improved students' metacognitive levels but also improved students' levels of language proficiency. The study implicated that integrating metacognitive strategy training into the classroom instruction had a positive effect on the students' metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive strategy and language proficiency.