| Due to the importance of reading among the basic foreign language skills, how to improve students' English reading proficiency has long been a common concern of researchers and English teachers. This thesis is a tentative study of improving students' reading proficiency from the viewpoint of the metacognitive strategy training. In the early times, great attention had been paid to the study of various teaching methodologies in order to find the most efficient one. However, there seemed to be no way out. For one thing, none of the methodologies can be said to be perfect. For another, there is no perfect methodology to everyone, if students are really treated as individuals. It was not until the 1 960s that the focus of research shifted from "how to teach" to "how to learn". For the first time, it was widely acknowledged that training students how to read was even more important. This is especially true as far as Chinese college students are concerned. Nowadays, the number of college students is always on the rise. As a result, teachers have to face a class of 40 to 60 students, whose English reading proficiency varies a lot. At the same time, college students are supposed to do most of their studies by themselves. In order to adapt to the new teaching environment and achieve the educational objective, teachers should consider how to foster students' ability to read independently. Drawing on the research on learning strategies at home and abroad, this thesis finally decides on the training of metacognitive strategies (the planning, monitoring, regulating and evaluating strategies) as the focus and probes how to integrate metacognitive strategy training into college English reading teaching for non-English majors.Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategies are at a higher lever than other strategies such as cognitive strategies, compensation strategies, memory strategies, social strategies, and affective strategies, since metacognitive strategies involve an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge (knowledge about oneself and others as learners, knowledge about the learning task and knowledge about the various regulatory skills) to plan, arrange, monitor, regulate and evaluate the learning process. This means once the reader has a good command of metacognitive strategies, he is able to assess the situation, to plan, to select appropriate skills, to sequence them, to coordinate them, to monitor or assess their effectiveness and to revise the plan when necessary. During the process, the reader communicates relevant information to the processVMASTER S THESISresponsible for task execution and collects feedback from the performance process to evaluate the success or failure of task execution so as to improve planning. The improved planning results in improved performance, and the cycle is repeated. In general, metacognitive strategies are classified into three groups:(1)centering your learning; (2) arranging and planning your learning; (3) evaluating your learning.In order to test whether or not metacognitive-strategy-based classroom instruction can help to foster independent English reader and improve students' reading proficiency, the author carried out a 16-week long teaching program based on metacognitive strategies among the 84 students in Grade One of Wuhan Institute of Science and Technology. Before the program, a questionnaire based on Oxford's strategy inventory for language learning was used to assess the students' current use of metacognitive strategies. During this program, metacognitive strategy training was integrated into classroom teaching. First of all, students were not only provided with necessary metacognitive knowledge about English reading but also helped to reflect their own strength and weakness in English reading. Students were made to realize that reading comprehension should always be seen as a kind of process - an active search for meaning process; a process of an application of different kinds of knowledge; a strategic process; and an...
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