Investigation And Study On Non-English Majors' Metacognitive Awareness And Foreign Language Reading

Metacognition which is called "cognition about cognition, knowing about knowing" is one's awareness and regulation of his cognition. Reading is considered as an activity not only involving cognition, but also metacognition. Students' metacognitve awareness is positively correlated with their study performance and reading performance; students with high metacognitive awareness perform better than students with low metacognitive awareness in learning and reading. There are lots of studies on metacognition training in first and second language reading abroad, and there are a few studies on metacognition training in foreign language reading, whereas studies on metacogniton in China focus on theory introduction and description and there are few studies on metacognition training in foreign language reading. Based on the above points, this thesis intends to discuss whether metacognitive awareness training in reading courses is more effective than the conventional reading teaching method (text presentation with explanation of difficult words, sentences, structures, and translation of difficult sentences) in improving the non-English majors' reading achievement.In the current study, the subjects (about 100 freshmen) were chosen from two intact classes (Class One was randomly assigned as the controlled class, Class Two as the experimental class) in Mathematics and Information Science College of Northwest Normal University. The present study, which was based on the results of the initial investigation on metacognitive awareness, adopted the model of combining Brown and Palincsar (1984) with Carrell et al. (1989)'s training in reading and conducted metacognitive awareness training in the experimental class for 14 weeks (28 hours). In the controlled class, students were taught difficult words, sentences, structures, and important language points in reading courses. The data collected were students' English scores in Matriculation Test, initial investigation and post investigation on metacognitive awareness, pre-test and post-test in reading and all the data were calculated by SSPS (Statistical Program for Social Science) 11.0 . The results indicate that the training of metacognitive awareness is more effective than conventional teaching method (explanation of difficult words, structures, and important language points and translation of difficult sentences) in enhancing the reading achievement of undergraduates of non-English majors.The thesis is composed of seven parts. Part One is an introduction which reports the significance and the purpose of the present study. Part Two is literature review which chiefly deals with the research on metacognition in reading abroad and in China. Part Three covers the main theories in metacognition and reading. Part Four deals with the experiment itself in great detail. It consists of the hypothesis of the present study, the materials used in the experiment, subjects, the procedure and the method of training aswell as the training model. Part Five is the data collection and data analysis. Part Six is the general discussion and conclusion. The conclusion of the present study is that there is significant correlation between students' metacognitive awareness and their English performance and their reading performance; students with high English achievement have more metacognitive awareness than those with low English achievement; in reading courses, the training of metacognitive awareness is more effective than conventional teaching method (explanation of difficult words, structures, and important language points and translation of difficult sentences) in enhancing the reading achievement of undergraduates of non-English majors. Part Seven presents the limitations and implications of the present study.