Application Of Meta-cognitive Strategy In English Writing Teaching In Junior Middle School

As we all know， Flavell put forward Metacognition firstly. It iscommonly defined as "cognition of cognition". It’s an important componentof metacognition and learning strategy system. The importance ofmetacognitive strategy has been to some extent well-studied. In the studies oflearning strategy system, O’Malley and Chamot (1990) classifies learningstrategy into three types, i.e. metacognitive strategy, cognitive strategy andsocial(affective) strategy，in which metacognitive strategy is considered at alevel above other strategies. In Zheng Ming’s classification, metacognitivestrategy is also considered at a level above other strategies (Zheng Ming,2000).So a large number of studies have been done to investigate therelationship between the use of metacognitive strategy and different learningtasks. In the past more than twenty years, a lot of researches have been doneon the relationship between metacognitive strategy use and second languageacquisition, but there are few researches related to the relationship betweenmetacognitive strategy use and EFL writing，especially in the context ofjunior middle school. Accordingly in the situation，the dissertation makes anattempt to investigate the use of metacognitive strategy in EFL writing amongjunior middle school students.The experiment has been conducted in Dongsheng No．2Middle School．In order to achieve high validity and reliability, the author has resigned a newtraining model for junior students of Grade8，following the sequence of stepsused in metacognitive strategy training models proposed byO’Malley&Chamot，Oxford’S and Flavell’S．In the whole strategy trainingprocess，the author applies dedicated instruction，integrated instruction andadjunct instruction to testify whether metacognitive strategy can improve thewriting proficiency． Two relevant research questions are proposedaccordingly：1) To find out if the metacognitive strategies are able to arousethe students’ interest in English writing in middle school;2) To find out if theMeta-cognitive strategies are able to help the students in middle school raise their ability of English writing.In order to answer the two questions, the author conducts a quantitativestudy on a sample of100students from Dongsheng No.2Middle School witha metacognitive strategy questionnaire and English writing tests. Then thedata is undergone descriptive statistics, comparison, and correlation analysis.The results indicate that:(1) The metacognitive writing strategies areable to arouse the students’ interest in English writing in middle school;(2)The metacognitive writing strategies are able to help the students in middleschool raise their ability of English writing.In the present study, it proves that the use of metacognitive strategy hasan important influence on junior middle school students’ English writingperformance. However, they don’t have strong metacognitive awareness. Sothe author gives some suggestions on how to improve their metacognitiveawareness and help them master the use of metacognitive strategy in Englishwriting, consequently improve their English writing ability. In addition, thereare restrictions in this research and undoubtedly more improvement should betaken into coasideration in it.