Influences Of Metacognitive Strategies On English Reading: A Study Of English Majors In China

This paper reports an empirical study of the influences of metacognitive strategies on English reading. Sixty -four sophomore English majors participated in the study. One questionnaire, one reading test and one English proficiency test were used to collect the data. SPSS 12.0 for Windows was adopted to analyze the data. The quantitative analyses of the data generated thefollowing major findings:(1) The individual metacognitive strategies usually used by the students are : 〧inding reading materials that are at or near one's level; (2)Adjusting reading rate by time and reading materials; (3) Anticipating the contents of the texts based on the title; (4)Relating prior knowledge to text content for understanding;(5)Relating main points to one another for understanding; (6) Paying attention to typographical features;(7) Paying attention to notes in the text, (8) Underlining and marking main points for remembering; (9) Paying attention to the topic sentences; (10) Rereading when faced with difficult content.The individual strategies that are not usually used by the students are: (1) Translating the text into Chinese and thinking in Chinese; (2)Focusing on determining the meanings of unknown words; (3)Looking up each unfamiliar word in the text.Of the five metacognitive strategy categories, the selective attention strategy category is most favored by the students, and the evaluating strategy category is least favored by them.(2) Metacognitive strategies have meaningfully positive effect on English reading,(3) Both English proficiency and metacognitive strategies can in some way predict English reading achievement, but the former appeares to be even more substantial.(4) Most of the metacognitive strategies highly used by the students seem to have not much effect on their reading comprehensionThe findings of this study indicate that metacognitive strategies do have some positive effect on English reading, and offer some insights into EFL reading instruction and metacognitive strategy training in China.