| The concept of Metacognition was put forward by the American Psychologist, Flavell, in 1976. In his opinion, metacognition is usually defined as the knowledge and cognition about cognitive objects, that is, about anything cognitive. In fact, this standpoint has already been stated. In the western countries, it can be dated back to the day of Plato and Aristotle; in China, the great educator, Confucius once said, "Living without thought means labor lost; thought without meaning is perilous". But at that time, people just stated the importance of thinking in learning from the aspect of perception. None of them studied and analyzed it as a single process. Flavell not only put forward the concept of metacognition, but also thought that metacognition could be studied from threeaspects--metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive strategies, and metacognitive experience. Someresearchers think that metacognitive knowledge is most important, and it is the necessary condition for improving the learners' autonomy (Wenden, 1991; Cotterall, 1995; Victori & Lockhart, 1995), which is also the purpose of this thesis-to study the significance of metacognitive knowledge in reading comprehension.In China, the study of metacognition was not carried on until the 1980's. People at first just introduced the western theories and ideas to China. Since the 1990's, the researchers began to study the importance of metacognition from the perspective of problem solving and the relationship with some other subjects. In the late 1990's, people began to study metacognition in FL learning. However, those studies were just from the perspective of metacognitive strategies, seldom from the perspective of metacognitive knowledge. At a sense, it is necessary and urgent to study the problems in FL reading from the perspective of metcognitive knowledge. We have engaged in the questionnaire among the undergraduates of Grade 2001, Guangxi Normal University. By carefully analyzing, we have found that while reading, good readers and poor readers always show different metacognitive knowledge, the former have more much metacognitive knowledge than the latter do. The poor readers don't know not only which method is efficient for language reading, but also how to improve the reading ability, which shows that metacognitive knowledge plays an important role in reading comprehension. If readers are lack of metacognitive knowledge, they would feel puzzled in choosing reading materials, and in adopting the appropriate reading methods and reading strategies, as a result, they couldn't self-plan, self-monitor, self-regulate and self-evaluate their own reading process scientifically and properly. They can only put the metacognitive strategies into their reading practice through enlarging their metacognitive knowledge, which is just the theme of this thesis. On the basis of the study, we propose a metacognitive knowledge-based reading method, which is as follows:Stage 1: The Knowing-what-readers-have-known Stage. Through this stage, the teacher can find the readers' prior reading habits and improper reading methods. Only in this way can he/she tike an efficient measurement in the instruction.Stage 2: The Showing-what-the -teacher-think Stage. This stage is mainly to the teacher, who should show the students his/her implication of the different reading methods in dealing with different reading materials, and then decide what strategies can be used to make reading more efficiently.Stage 3: The Correcting-what-the-learners-do Stage. The teacher should have patience in atoning for the readers' shortcomings that haven't been realized by them, but in the course of doingthis, the readers' affective factors should be taken into consideration, as well as their ideas. To find the reasons of those deficiencies is much more important than to find them out.Stage 4: The Narrowing-what-the-learners-don't-know Stage. During the reading process, readers' background knowledge, especially cultural background knowledge plays an important role. The teacher should...
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