An Empirical Study On The Teachability Of Metacognitive Strategies In EFL Reading Class

Metacognitive strategies in reading comprehension are higher order executive skills which have the most decisive role to play in the improvement of learner's reading proficiency. So far, the researches concerning metacognition have flourished both at home and abroad, yielding abundant achievements. However, at home, there are only a small number of empirical researches on metacognition. On the other hand, on the basis of foreign training models, domestic researches on the training of metacognitive strategies are still at a tentative stage. Rather than limited to the exploration of the relationship between the relationship between metacognitive strategies and reading proficiency, this paper takes a further step to investigate the teachablity of metacognitive strategies and the different effects of the same training methods upon readers of different reading proficiency levels.Adopting Garner and Alexander (1989)'s metacognitive components theory and O'Mally and Chamot (2001)'s metacognitive strategy classification framework as theoretical foundation, this study takes a questionnaire, a three-month classroom instruction and two reading tests as instruments to investigate 126 Senior One students of High School Attached to Northeast Normal University. After the four stages of a pilot test, a pre-test, classroom instructions and a post test, descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations and T-tests are implemented to process the collected data. Several conclusions are reached as follows:1. Self-monitoring, selective attention, self-evaluation and planning, are all reported to be used at a medium level, following a descending order.2. The awareness of using metacognitive strategies is positively related to EFL learners'reading proficiency. Those who are highly aware of using metacognitive strategies will perform better in reading comprehension than those who are less aware of such strategies.3. Metacognitive strategies are teachable and the same metacognitive training method will have different effects upon learners of different reading proficiency levels: metacognitive training has the most conducive to middle group students and has the least effect upon low group students.This study can broaden researchers'horizons and facilitate English educators with some guidance on their English study. However, since this is only a tentative approach to the teachabilitiy of metacognition, limitations are inevitable and more efforts and investigatins are necessary.