Study On Metacognitive Strategy Training In College English Vocabulary Teaching

In recent years, more and more researchers and foreign language teachera are pay more attention on vocabulary teahing at home and abroad. They mainly focus on such questions as how to help students learn vocabulary effectively and how to improve their abilities to make use of vocabulary. In the field of vocabulary learning strategy, the researchers put their attention from the early identification and description to the validation and training of learning strategies.Among various kinds of learning strategies used in vocabulary acquisition, metacognitive strategy should be the most important one. This reseach adopt the concept and classification of metacognitive strategies by O'Malley & Chamot in 1990 as the theory foundation. This theory emphasis that metacognitive straregy is a higher-level strategy, that can help you to improve the ability to plan, monitor, and evaluate in your learning process. With this theoretical framework, this research studies three categories of learners' metacognitive strategies in vocabulary learning. They are planning, monitoring and evaluation. O'Malley and Chamot (1994) propose an approach called Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA), it gives us a uesful framework for the language learning strategies. CALLA approach provide a five-phase cycling sequence:(1) preparation (2) presentation (3) practice (4) evaluation (5) expandation.This metacognitive vocabulary learning strategy training lasts 15 weeks. There are two classes of freshmen who are non-English majors:one class is the Experimental Group (EG), the other is the Control Group (CG). Before the training, both groups will take a pre-questionnaire and a vocabulary pre-test, aiming to investigate the present situation of the students'use of metacognitive strategies and level of their vocabulary learning. After the training, the same questionnaire and a vocabulary post-test are used again to check the difference between the two groups in metacognitive strategy use. Then all the data collected and analyzed by SPSS 16.0. Besides, data of pre-training interview, learning logs and reports are qualitatively analyzed. The data of analysis shows that:(1) After the training, the students'use of metacognitive strategies in the EG is improved. There are significant differences in planning and monitoring strategies. (2) After the training, the students' use metacognitive strategies in the EG more often than those in the CG. There are no significant differences in the evaluating strategies. (3) According to the vocabulary test, the students in the EG have made more progress than those in the CGBased on the data analysis, it shows that there is great need and necessity for further metacognitive learning strategy using and training to improve the learners' awareness and use of metacognitive strategies in the future teaching and learning. And it also can improve students' language learning as a whole and help them to learn the target language vocabularies more effectively.