A Study Of The Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy Training In Vocabulary Learning

In recent years,with more and more attention paid to learner autonomy, "learning strategy training" becomes the new focus of researches both at home and abroad.Among all the learning strategies,metacognitive strategy is a higher-order executive skill that involves ability to consciously plan,monitor,manage and evaluate learning process.In foreign language teaching and learning,it is known that vocabulary learning is of vital importance.Therefore,vocabulary learning strategy training has also evoked extensive studies.However,no conclusion has been achieved on the effects of metacognitive strategy training on vocabulary learning.In addition,in the existing studies,there have been few studies that choose students in independent colleges as subjects. Therefore,the present study aims to explore the effects of metacognitive strategy training on the vocabulary learning of students in an independent college.This thesis reports a 15-week metacognitive vocabulary learning strategy training with 56 non-English major freshmen,who are in the experimental group(EG). Another 50 students are in the control group(CG).Before the training,a questionnaire and an interview are designed to investigate the students' use of metacognitive strategies in vocabulary learning.A vocabulary pre-test is also adopted to find out their vocabulary performance.According to the results of the investigation,the training focuses on three metacognitive strategies:planning,monitoring and evaluating.After the training,the same questionnaire and a vocabulary post-test are administrated to check the effects of the training on the metacognitive strategy use and vocabulary performance.All the data collected is analyzed with the help of SPSS13.0.Apart from these,data from interviews,learning logs and reports are qualitatively analyzed.The results reveal that after the training,the students in the EG use metacognitive strategies more often than the students in the CG.Significant difference can be found between the two groups on planning and monitoring strategies.However,there is no significant difference between the two groups on the evaluating strategies.With regard to the vocabulary performance,the subjects in the EG have made more progress than those in the CG.In other words,there are very significant differences between the two groups on their performances in three vocabulary tests.Base on the data analysis,it can be concluded that explicit metacognitive strategy training has a significantly positive effect on the vocabulary learning of non-English majors of independent colleges.Besides,the training is effective in the promotion of students' learner autonomy in their language learning process.