The Effectiveness Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On English Learning Of The Students In Senior High Schools

This is an experimental report on a study of metacognitive strategy training for English learners in senior middle schools in Chinese settings. It aimed at finding out the effectiveness of the training in metacognitive strategies. The study is significant in that it represents the learner-centered notion in education and aims at developing learner autonomy. The primary purposes of the study were to investigate how frequently the students use metacognitive strategies and then to train them in some metacognitive strategies to see if their proficiency of English would be improved through the training. The study was designed as a quasi-experiment, taking two intact classes of the first graders in a senior middle school as the subjects, experimental group and comparison group. The training included five subsets of the metacognitive strategies: self-awareness, language awareness, planning, monitoring and evaluation, and it lasted about sixteen weeks. The main approach used in the training was combining metacognitive awareness with metacognitive strategies, and combining separated training with integrated training. The results suggested that the students who received training in metacognitive strategies outperformed those who had not been trained. The mean difference of the post-test was significant at the 0.05 level. The study has proved that training students in metacognitive strategies does facilitate English learning. The approach of combining metacognitive awareness with metacognitive strategies and combining separated training with integrated training is effective'because some metacognitive strategies are hard to be completely integrated into the language learning materials of classroom teaching.