A Study Of The Effectiveness Of Metacognitive Strategies Training For Promoting Non-English Majors' Autonomy In English Learning

As the old Chinese saying goes: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime." To cultivate autonomous learners and autonomous individuals has become an ideal pedagogical goal of language teaching and learning.During the recent three decades, a great number of researchers have focused on the cultivation of learner autonomy in language learning from different perspectives. Among these studies, the necessity and feasibility of strategy training remains a controversial issue among English teachers, and the practice of strategies training, especially metacognitive strategies training, is not widespread in college English teaching in China. This thesis intends to obtain some empirical evidence in this aspect with the expectation to measure the effectiveness of metacognitive strategies training for promoting learner autonomy.The thesis starts with the review of literature on metacognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies training and learner autonomy, in which the relationship among the three concepts is explored and the theoretical background for the following discussion is formed. In order to know whether it is effective to promote learner autonomy through metacognitive strategies training, the writer carried out an experiment, the experiment involved 80 first-year non-English majors from Shandong Institute of Light Industry. 40 of them major in Financial Management, the others major in Human Resources Management. The participants were divided into two groups, the Experimental Group (EG) and the Control Group (CG). A ten-week metacognitive strategies training for the participants in the EG was carried out, the participants in the CG had the regular classes. A questionnaire was designed to provide data for quantitative analysis with the help of SPSS (Statistic Package for Social Science), the questionnaire was handed out as both pre-training and post-training measurement. The pre-training questionnaire was conducted only in the EG before the training, the post-training questionnaire was conducted both in the EG and the CG. Aside from the questionnaire, diary and interview served as data for qualitative analysis. The pre-training data analysis provided the teacher with the realistic situation of learns' metacognitive strategies use, and it revealed the learners' real attitude towards learner autonomy in the EG, it also provided useful information for the following metacognitive strategies training. The data comparison between pre-training and post-training include the descriptive analysis, Paired-Sample t-Test, Independent- Sample t-Test and Pearson Correlation analysis. The main findings are summarized as follows: (1) the participants in the EG made great improvement in metacognitive strategies use after the training, they used metacognitive strategies more often than those in the CG after the training. (2) The training was effective in improving their use of MS or at least in their awareness of MS use, especially in monitoring strategies use. (3) The participants in the EG became more autonomous in English learning after the training, meanwhile, they were much more autonomous in English learning than the students in the CG.. (4) Pearson correlation analysis shows that there is a positive correlation at the significant level (.000) between metacognitive strategies use and learner autonomy in general (r=.578**), it means that the more you employ metacognitive strategies in English learning, the more learning autonomy you own or the more autonomously you perform in English learning. Our conclusion is that metacognitive strategies training is welcome and effective among college students in their use of metacognitive strategies or at least in their awareness of metacognitive strategies use, and the training do facilitate the promotion of learning autonomy, we can promote learners' learning autonomy through the metacognitive strategies training, in this way, the learner can finally become autonomous learner in their English learning.In the light of the findings, this study provides some pedagogical enlightenment for EFL teaching and learning in Chinese college. Although the strategy training in this thesis might be considered premature, it ought not to serve as a temporary expedient measure in promoting learner autonomy. Instead, it should be consistently imbedded in the whole process of classroom teaching and learning, which make it possible to develop learners' capability of autonomous learning life long.