Enhancing Reading Ability Of Non-English Majors With Metacognitive Strategies In After-class Reading

Reading is a significant component of English learning. Massive and efficient reading is considered as the input of learning, therefore, teaching reading is supposed as the hot topic in methodological research conducted by linguists and language educators. In Da Hongying University, for non-English majors, they spend 180 minutes per week in English class, which is far from enough for obtaining sufficient input for English learning. As supplement to in-class learning, after-class reading has been ignored by non-English majors since its significance has not been realized. The reasons are analyzed by the author as following:(1) When students were in high school, they spent most of their energy into textbook study and exam paper practice in face with the college entrance exam. (2) The lack of initiative in after-class reading causes the students no nothing about how to choose the after-class reading material and how to develop the after-class reading activities. (3) The lack of teachers' monitoring and guidance causes students are suspicious of the importance of after-class reading and inefficiency in after-class reading.Since Flavell defined metacognition originally used in the field of psychology, lots of linguists and language educators home and abroad have introduced the term into language teaching and learning study. Take the example of O'Malley & Chamot putting forward the concept of metacognitive strategies. As an essential part of learning strategy study, metacognitive strategies have been widely applied in each aspect of language teaching and learning such as listening teaching, reading teaching, writing teaching and so forth. It has been proven that metacognitive strategies play a positive role in English learning. However, the research of the application in metacognitive strategies is seldom. On the basis of other research and O'Malley & Chamot's metacognitive strategies for framework, the author made the plan of training metacognitive strategies in their after-class reading aiming at enhancing the students'awareness of sufficient after-class reading, which is helpful for facilitating students to form reading habits transferred from passive reading to active reading. The reading efficiency and reading ability is expected to be improved in this way. In this thesis, two classes from the Management and Finance department in Da Hongying University are chosen as the experimental subjects. One class is considered as experimental class with metacognitive strategies training and the other one is considered as the control class without metacognitive training. Each class is composed of 42 students. Both of the classes are required to do after class reading and the one of the big differences between the two classes was that the experimental class was required to use the metacognitive strategies in their reading and control class did the reading without any requirements. The research was divided into three phases: step one, before the training,both of the classes were required to fill the questionnaire about metacognitive strategies and finish the reading comprehension test paper to evaluate their reading ability and the situation of using the strategies. Step two, the author trained the metacognitive strategies in experimental class. Step three, after the training, both of the classes were required to fill the questionnaire and reading comprehension to evaluate their condition of using the metacognitive strategies and reading ability in post-training. All the data were statistically analyzed by the software SPSS 13.0.The result of the data showed that in the pre-test, there was no significant difference between the two classes. While in post test, there was significant difference. For the questionnaire, there was no significant difference on the condition of using metacognitive strategies between the two classes in pre-questionnaire. While in post-questionnaire, there was significant difference. The result furthermore demonstrated that the usage of metacognitive strategies in after-class reading is beneficial for students to establish the good reading habits so that they can absorb more knowledge and information than before. Not only do improve in the vocabulary, but also the usage of sentence pattern which is the basic of enhancing the reading ability. Particularly, the students can make evaluation on whether they make progress or not in English study with the assistance of self-evaluation strategy.