The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Reading In Higher Vocational College

As we all know, reading comprehension is very important among the basic foreignlanguage skills and how to improve learners’ English reading proficiency and reading levelhas long been a common concern of researchers and English teachers. Recently, a gradualshift has taken place in English teaching—the focus of research has been shifted from “howto reach” to “how to learn”. English teachers began to realize that students’ autonomousreading is even more important. Therefore, it is necessary to train the students’ application ofeffective learning strategies to English reading, so that they can become skilled Englishlearners and lay a good foundation for their language development.Since1970’s, research on language learning strategies especially in reading hasattracted more and more attention throughout the world. Among all the learning strategies,metacognitive strategies are the most important strategies. Flavell, Oxford，Chamot andO’Malley are among the prominent researchers, who categorized and expoundedmetacognitive strategies scientifically from different angles. Metacognitive strategiesinvolve an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge to plan, arrange, monitor,regulate, and evaluate the learning process. However, these studies on metacognition havebeen carried out either in English as a second language setting or focusing on generalEnglish learning. And little attention has been paid to investigating Chinese highervocational college students’ metacognition in their reading process and reading achievement.Moreover, higher vocational college students often have problems in reading, but theyseldom employ metacognitive strategies to solve these problems.Through researching the current situation of Chinese learners’ application ofmetacognitive strategies to English reading, the author has testified the effectiveness of theexperiment, and found that there are many problems in the learners’ reading strategiesapplications to English reading. So the author probes many effective ways on how tointegrate learners’ metacognitive strategy training into higher vocational college Englishreading and to improve their reading efficiency.In order to verify whether metacognitive-strategy-based classroom instruction canimprove students’ reading proficiency, the author carried out a18-week long teachingprogram based on metacognitive strategies theory among the120students in highervocational college of Shenyang Pharmaceutical University. Two different trainingapproaches on reading comprehension were taken in two groups. The experiment group wasinstructed and trained mainly through five-procedure approach of planning, monitoring,problem solving, evaluation and expansion, while the control group was only trained incognitive strategies. All the subjects were required to take the pre-test and post-test. All thedata were analyzed by software SPSS.The results are as follows:(1) Chinese Higher Vocational College students show littleknowledge of metacognitive knowledge, and they used the metacognitive strategies in English reading less frequently.(2) Metacognitive strategy training was effective inimproving students’ reading proficiency to a large extent.The results prove that metacognitive strategy training contributes to the improvement ofstudents’ reading motivation and helps students to plan, monitor and evaluate their readingeffectively. Besides, through the training, metacognition can help students find a efficientway to develop English knowledge, learning ability and self-awareness. The training canalso develop the students’ ability of independent and autonomous learning. Once the studentsmaster the metacognitive strategies, they’ll become the real masters of their English learning,which will benefit them all their life.