A Preliminary Study Of Chinese English Majors' Metacognition And Their Achievements

In the past few decades learning strategy has become one of the hottest topics in the field of language learning and teaching. While early studies on learning strategies were more exploratory in nature, later research became more theory-based and more scientific. Most recently, researchers have noticed that one group of learning strategies, i.e. metacognitive learning strategies (MLS) are of specific importance. However, many previous studies were focused mainly on metacognitive strategies (MS) or metacognitive knowledge (MK) respectively, while studies on metacognitive learning strategies are quite few. Chinese researchers also paid attention to learning strategies, but most studies were done on direct cognitive strategies, such as vocabulary strategies and listening comprehension strategies. As previous studies have proved that mere knowing "what to do" is far from enough for learners to learn a language well, learners should know "how to do". Bearing this background in mind, the author of this paper took English majors as subjects and investigated metacognitive learning strategies they employ in the hope of gaining some insights as to how to help these students in terms of using metacognitive learning strategies.This dissertation reports on a preliminary study of Chinese English majors' metacognitive learning strategies in relation to their achievements. This study, which involved 152 subjects from the School of Foreign Languages of the Southwest China Normal University, the questionnaire was used as data collection device and adopted SPSS as data analysis device.The whole dissertation consists of five chapters:Chapter One gives a brief introduction of research background, the significance of the present study, clarifications of some concepts and the arrangement of this dissertation.Chapter Two introduces the definitions of metacognition and its two dimensions, that is, Metacognitive knowledge (MK) and metacognitive strategies (MS). Their interrelationship is also discussed. Then, models explaining SLA are presented. Following that, the relevance of metacognition and language learning is analyzed.Chapter Three reviews the studies regarding learning strategies, metacognitive knowledge, and metacognitive strategies. From the review, we can see that there is few studies devoted to examining metacognition at its full length in other countries, let alone studies in Chinese context. Thus, the situation calls for more research in this area.Chapter Four aims to report on the objectives, instruments, subjects, data collecting procedures of the present study and the results. Some statistical methods, such as correlational analysis and ANOVA have been applied to process data obtained. The statistical results showed that (1) there does exist correlationship between learners' MLS and learning achievements, and learners' metacognition has a positive influence on their leaning activity; (2) roughly speaking, the successful learners are better users of metacognitive strategies than the less successful learners, especially in monitoring strategies; (3) even though the successful learners do comparatively better than the less successful learners in self-evaluation, both are weak in this area.Chapter Five summarizes the implications drawn from the empirical investigation in chapter four. Some weaknesses of this study are also discussed. The author also proposes that metacognitive learning strategies are worth further study in that it can help learners promote learning efficiency for a whole life time.