A Preliminary Study Of Integrating Metacognitive Strategy Training Into College English Teaching In China

Since the 1970s, there's an upsurge of extensive investigation into metacognition, a hot topic in cognitive psychology. This trend parallels with the explosion of methodologies in the past decades. Metacognition accompanies all kinds of learning tasks. It can be defined simply as thinking about thinking. Understanding and controlling cognitive processes may be one of the most essential skills that classroom teachers can help second or foreign language learners develop. While contemporary English education aims at developing autonomous learners and problem-solvers. Among the many approaches to promote learner autonomy, learner training of strategy use is greatly relevant to individual development at school. Nowadays, the issue of metacognitive development is only one part of strategy studies in language teaching and learning. However, former studies usually focused on description and classification of learning strategies or to investigate the relation between strategy application and the results of second or foreign language learning. Even though there're studies concerning learner training, they often involves comprehensive strategy training, namely, metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies. Strategy training with a focus on metacognition is rare, especially at tertiary level in China. In addition, there are still a lot of problems in terms of metacognition existing in nowadays foreign language learning. Learners usually have negative, vague, and conflicting knowledge of language learning; they are lack of metacognitive strategies and don't know how and when to use them; they can't deal with affect influence effectively in language learning. Based on these findings, the study proposes integrating metacognitive strategy training into college English teaching as an important aspect to cultivate learner autonomy. This may be as an attempt to bridge the findings of strategic learning and their applications in EFL. Aiming to solve the current problems, the topic is examined from three respects: Why do we need metacognitive strategy training? What does such training involve? How can such training be carried out in classroom? After reviewing and synthesizing former studies on metacognition, learner autonomy, and strategy training, the study puts forward detailed implications for metacognitive strategy training in the classroom, which covers complicated practical guidelines and major issues concerning learner training. Besides, the author discusses a training program to further support her point. In the end, some more pedagogical suggestions are provided for foreign teachers.