The Effectiveness Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On English Learning Of Freshmen At Higher Vocational Colleges

In China, Education Ministry has set one of the main goals of English teaching and learning as "developing the students' autonomous English learning" in The English Course Teaching Demand for the College English. This urgently demands teachers and advanced education authorities to create the prerequisites for autonomous learning to guarantee that all the students will improve both in intellect and in overall abilities. The goal of education is to cultivate learners' autonomy. Studies in metacognition suggest that the ideal way to accomplish this is through metacognitive strategy training. Metacognitive strategies are the management steps taken to ensure successful language learning. They include centering your learning, arranging and planning your learning, and evaluating your learning (Oxford 1990). Such self-regulation strategies play a vital role in developing learners' autonomy, and the training is now generally believed to be an effective way to improve strategy use and language proficiency.Over the past twenty years research on metacognitive strategies has been on the rise. Compared with the research on other learning strategies, however, the research on metacognitive strategies is still in an embryonic stage. In China, few L2 researchers have explored metacognition and metacognitive strategies in the field of higher vocational education. The current relevant researches are mainly concerned with the four-year university students. Drawing on the research on learning strategies at home and abroad, the present research finally decides on the training of metacognitive strategies(the Planning, monitoring, regulating and evaluating strategies) as the focus , aims to construct a metacognitive strategy training program for freshmen at higher vocational colleges, and to further probe the effectiveness of the training model and the training itself.However, the higher vocational colleges in our country have been quick it developing in recent years. The higher vocational education is quite different from any of the higher education in China, which undertakes the task of training qualifie and applied technical workers to meet the needs of industries and enterprises The play an active role in our socialist economic construction. Moreover, the students...