Chinese College Students' Metacognitive Strategy Use And Their English Learning

In recent years, a nationwide reformation in the field of language teaching has been advocated in hope of improving the proficiency of foreign language (FL) learning and teaching. The universal tendency thrusts the author to do the current research about metacognitive strategy use (MSU) in terms of developing learner autonomy, which is supposed to result in positive impact on the learning achievements. Metacognitive strategies refer to those strategies related to thinking and reflective processes. It can be divided into three main components: planning (goal-setting, centering attention, task analysis and time management etc.), monitoring (keeping track of how learning process is going and taking appropriate measures to deal with difficulties that interfere with the process) and evaluating (assessing effect of strategy use and learning achievements), while learner autonomy is believed to be the inner ability to manage and control one's own learning process by particular strategies or skills. However, it is not coming into being by nature but developed gradually through outer domain. As Legutke and Thomas (1991) note, it is the mutual benefit between MSU and autonomous learning. The management in MSU will lead to improved ability of self-directed learning.This thesis is going to answer the following questions:1) What is the present situation of MSU among the learners under investigation?2) What characterizes the specific relationship between MSU and learning achievements after strategy training program?Through MSU questionnaire, the present study collected data of 345 non-English majors who were studying in Chang'an University, Shaanxi Normal University and Xi'an Institute of Technology respectively. The strategy training and interview were conducted to the yoked group with 33 sample students for 16 weeks. The data was then analyzed by SPSS (11.5), demonstrating descriptive analysis, paired samples T-test, multiple regressions and correlations, which assisted to answer the two questions.The first question is illustrated by integrating the three tables in questionnaire study and some characteristics are summarized as follows.