The Application Of Metacognition To Oral English Teaching In Vocational Colleges

Oral English plays a vital role in the international contacts and communicationsin today’s Information Era In order to meet the social demand, the Ministry ofEducation of China has promulgated the Basic Requirement of English Education inVocational College in 2000, which requires students in vocational colleges to be ableto communicate easily with each other in English in their daily lives. However, manystudents in vocational colleges have very poor oral English for lack of enthusiasm andconfidence in oral English study, due to their weak foundation or inappropriateEnglish teaching and learning methods..Based on her teaching experience in a vocational college, the author finds thatstudents’unawareness and inefficient application of metacognition is one of the mainreasons for their low efficiency of oral English study. The domestic researchers whohave studied on metacognition in recent years also pointed out that the application ofmetacognition contributed to the huge differences in students’oral English study.Nevertheless, the current researches on metacognition are mainly in the initialtheoretical stage without empirical data, especially studies on the application ofmetacognition to oral English teaching in vocational colleges. The present study,therefore, aims to testify the feasibility and effectiveness of the application ofmetacognition to oral English teaching in vocational colleges, by empirical dataobtained from teaching experiment. The specific research questions to answer are: 1)Can metacognition inspire students’interest in oral English study? 2) Canmetacognition effectively improve students’oral English competence?The teaching experiment was carried out for one semester (18 weeks) with sixprocedures: 1) Pre-test. The pre-test was conducted among all the students in Grade08, Ri Zhao Vocational College. Two parallel classes were chosen as the Control Class and Experimental Class, each class with 50 students. 2) Pre-questionnaire. Itreflected students’attitude towards oral English study before the experiment.3)Teaching Experiment. The metacognition was applied to the oral English teachingin the experimental class, but not in the control class, which was taught as usual. 4)Post-test. The post-test was carried out in both the experimental class and the controlclass at the end of the experiment, in order to do data collection and check whethertest results were significantly different between two classes. 5) Post-questionnaire. Ithelped the researcher to know the changes of student’s attitude towards oral Englishstudy in experimental class. 6) Interview. The interview was conducted in theexperimental class to know more about students’study experience under the guidanceof metacognition. The data from the pre-test and post-test were processed by softwareSPSS13.0.The results questionnaires and interview were analyzed quantitatively orqualitatively in order to testify the effectiveness of the research.The data analysis results showed that 1) The application of metacognition greatlypromoted the oral English ability of the students in experimental classes, who in thepost-test achieved significantly higher scores than Control Class. 2) Metacognitioncould inspire students’interest in practicing oral English. 3) The application ofmetacognition could also enhance students’learning attitudes towards oral Englishstudy in vocational colleges. Therefore, it can be concluded that applyingmetacognition to oral English teaching is feasible and effective in vocational colleges.In spite of the positive results, the study had its limitations. Some proposals forfurther study were put forward in the end.