A Study On Metacognitive Awareness Of English Reading Strategies Of Senior High School Students

Metacognitive awareness of reading strategies,as a kind of ability to monitor and adjust reading activities,is a key factor to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful readers.In many fields,learners are divided into experts and novices according to whether learners are able to use strategies at the metacognitive level.Expert readers generally use a lot of appropriate strategies when reading materials in L1/L2 contexts.Metacognitive awareness can help ESL readers to adjust reading strategies,to monitor cognitive process of reading and improve the level of reading comprehension.In other words,successful reading not only depends on whether readers know what reading strategies to use,most importantly,readers also must know when to use,how to effectively use appropriate strategy and why the strategy is used according to specific reading contexts.This study aims to further validate the relationship between metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and reading proficiency.By conducting a questionnaire about metacognitive awareness of reading strategies---SORS,it aims at increasing students’ knowledge about metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and attach the importance of understanding second or foreign language students’ metacognitive knowledge systems in relation to second or foreign learning achievement.The experiment was guided by the following three research questions.1)What is the overall level of metacognitive awareness of English reading strategies?2)What is the relationship between metacognitive awareness of English reading strategies and reading proficiency?3)Is there any difference in the level of metacognitive awareness of English reading strategies between high-and low-proficiency students?The study involved 230 participants from a key senior high school.The participants were senior one students,who were incorporated into four classes,including science class and arts class.The research tools in this research were from three aspects,which contained a questionnaire,one test and a semi-structured interview.Finally software SPSS 19.0 was adopted to calculate and analyze these data results.Based on the results’ analyses,the findings of the study can be summarized as follows:First of all,the study finds out that senior high school students in the key senior high school have an overall medium level of metacognitive awareness of English reading strategies.Secondly,with regard to the relationship between students’ metacognitive strategy awareness in English reading and their reading achievement,there is a significant positive correlation between metacognitive awareness and reading comprehension among senior high school students.PROB strategies held the highest correlation with reading achievement,GLOB strategies ranked the second but SUP strategies was not correlated with reading achievement.Finally,in terms of academic achievement difference in metacognitive awareness of reading strategies,students in high achievement group have better overall metacognitive awareness than those in low achievement group.However,there exists no difference in support strategies between high achievers and low achievers.According to the findings in the research,some implications can be drawn for metacognitive awareness of reading strategies:1)It is necessary for English teachers to carry out explicit instruction in metacognitive awareness of reading strategy in class.2)Students should be encouraged to increase vocabulary size and strengthen grammatical knowledge so as to promote their language proficiency.3)Teachers should develop students’ intrinsic reading motivation through all kinds of interesting reading activities in order to make students become self-regulated readers.