An Application Of Metacognitive Strategy Training To English Reading Teaching In Junior Middle School

Reading is an important language ability.By reading,students can enlarge their knowledge of vocabulary,phrases and grammar.They could intensify their language sense and exercise their thought through analyzing and summarizing those reading materials.Reading activities would help students to get more knowledge about culture.At the same time,the reading part has the highest points among various types of English test,which is an important part to English proficiency.As a result,teachers and students all pay much attention to it.However,reading is the part that students lost scores most easily.The interference of new words,unfamiliarly with the main idea of the article,the failure to grasp the main points of the questions and lack of skills of comprehending the passage are the problems that students often encounter.The fundamental reason is that the teachers lack the reading strategy training for the students in the daily teaching.They only focus on the unknown words and important grammar points in teaching reading materials,and ignore the analysis of the overall structure of this article.So the students only pay attention to the specific part of the article and fail to develop their own awareness and ability to actively analyze an article.This thesis draws on the relevant researches on metacognitive strategies and English reading comprehension at home and abroad,and it focuses on the training of metacognitive strategies in junior middle school English teaching.It mainly studies and analyzes the following three questions: 1.What changes have taken place in students' application of learning strategies in English reading before and after the experiment? 2.What impact does metacognitive strategy training have on students' autonomous learning ability? 3.What is the correlation between the level of using metacognitive strategies and the reading performance of students?In this research,61 students from two classes in Grade Eight of Meng jiaping Middle School are the research subjects.And they will receive the metacognitive strategy training in daily English reading teaching for 13 weeks.This thesis uses questionnaires and tests as main instruments for the research.Through contrasting and analyzing those data from tests and questionnaires,the author came to the following conclusions.Firstly,by analyzing thequestionnaire on application of learning strategies in English reading between the experimental class and the control class,it was found that students in the experimental class used learning strategies better in their reading process.Among them,the use of metacognitive strategies has the greatest change and the highest frequency.Social strategy was the lowest.Then,through analyzing the second questionnaire on students' autonomous learning ability,it shows that students' autonomous learning abilities have been greatly improved after the metacognitive strategy training.Finally,if students have a higher level in using metacognitive strategies in English reading,they would get a higher score in this part.It means that they two have a positive correlation.Therefore,metacognitive strategy training should be combined with daily English teaching and conducted for a long term.And it needs a progressive process.According to specific reading tasks,teachers are supposed to demonstrate and train metacognitive strategies and supplement other relevant learning strategies to students.In addition,teachers must have a complete and solid knowledge of metacognitive strategies.They should update their teaching concept and pay attention to students' autonomy and positivity.In this way,students' autonomous learning ability can be improved greatly.