Research On The Correlation Between Metacognition And EFL Reading Of College Students

'Metacognition' has been a very much-concerned topic in educational psychology for the past two decades. According to this theory, one actively monitors, controls, evaluates, and regulates his cognitive strategies to achieve his purpose in a cognitive behavior. Meanwhile, it is commonly believed that reading comprehension is a process in which the reader constructs meaning based on the information from the visual text and his relevant background knowledge. Although there are many researches abroad that suggested that metacognition has positive impact on FL/SL reading comprehension, few L2 researchers have touched this topic in China. Aware of this lacking, the author carried out the present study to explore some questions in this field.This study addressed the following research questions: What is the state of Chinese College students' metacognitive knowledge of their English reading? Is there any positive relation between students' metacognitive knowledge and their English reading performance? Do the students with higher metacognitive level read in English better than those with lower level?To answer these questions, a reading test and metacognition questionnaire survey were administered to 149 freshmen at Jilin University, and the data concerning the metacognitive level and students' reading ability was collected. All the data was keyed into SPSS V11.0 to analyze through descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation coefficient, F-test and T-test. The major findings of the present study are: 1) Chinese College students' metacognitive awareness in their English reading is relatively low, especially strategy task. 2) Metacognition has the correlation with reading ability and the impact on EFL reading performance. This thesis is organized into five chapters. Chapter One describes the context and the rationale of this study, highlights the purpose and the research questions. Chapter Two reviews the literature that provides the theoretical framework for this study. The area of research reviewed includes the theory of reading and metacognition, especially metacognitive knowledge. In addition, study on metacognitive reading awareness are reviewed which provides a foundation for the purpose and rationale of this study. Chapter Three outlines the method used for this study and describes the participants, instruments, data collection procedure, and data analyses. Chapter Four presents the results of the data analyses. Chapter Five summaries the findings related to the research questions. Limitations of this study were discussed. At the same time, the chapter discusses the implications for English class teaching and recommendation for future metacognitive research.