An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Metacognitive Training To English Reading Comprehension Ability Of TV University Students

Metacognition was generally defined as "any knowledge and cognitive regulation to the ongoing congnitive activities". Its essence is the cognition to cognitive activities. During the past two decades, Metacognition has drawn much attention in the field of cognitive psychology and educational psychology. The significance of Metacognition for the psychology research is that it emphasizes the similarities among traditional cognitive category and can help integrating cognitive system. Moreover, metacognition not only plays an important role in many cognitive activities but also has a wide application in many other psychology field, such as cognitive behavior correction, artificial intelligence, social learning and adaptation, personality development, etc. Because metacognition can effectively regulate students' studying activities and promote the transfer of learning, so many scholars approve that metacognition is the key to the strategies of learning. Some researches also represented that there is a strong correlation between metacognition and students' academic achievements and learning capacity.Reading comprehension also consists of many metacognitive activities, especially for foreign language reading comprehension. Being an important metacognitive process in reading, the reading comprehension monitoring has attracted the interest of psychologists and educationists in the last two decades. Many inspiring findings have been achieved by researchers abroad. But in domestic, the study on this field is very limited. So, this research, in connection with the practical problems of Radio and TV University, try to explore the effect of metacognitive training to students' English reading ability and autonomous learning capacity. Its aim is to testify whether metacognitive training can efficiently improve students' academic achievements and learning capacity.In this study, 93 freshmen of Yunnan Radio and TV University were divided into three groups in a counterbalance way based on their English scores in college entrance exam and the scores of learning self-regulation scale. Then the three groups were arranged randomly to accept different experimental treatment respectively, the arrangement as following: the experimental group (accepted the metacognitive training treatment), the first control group (accepted the traditional reading instruction treatment) and the second control group (accepted nontreatment). After the experiment, all subjects took part in the test of English reading exam, English reading metacognition ability questionnaire and learning self-regulation scale. Then these scores were further compared with pretest scores respectively.The result shows that the experimental group has a significant increase in the scores of English reading exam and English reading metacognition ability questionnaire, as well as the scores of four dimensions (consciousness, means, feedback and summarization) of learning self-regulation scale. The result indicates that the metacognitive training indeed improved students' academic achievements and autonomous learning capacity. It supports our assumption and affirms that the metacognition plays a very important role in the instruction of learning strategies. Therefore, we point out that the essential way to improve the students' academic achievements and learning capacity is to put metacognition theory into a wide range of application among teaching activities. So we should make great efforts in many aspects such as method perfecting and condition creating on the metacognitive training in future researches.