The Effects Of Metacognitive Instruction On Strategy Use For Less Capable TV University Students In ESL Reading

In this paper, the author intends to investigate the effects of metacognitive instruction on strategy use for less capable TV students in ESL. Many studies have also proved that instruction on reading strategies can improve students' comprehension performance. And the focus of reading strategy has been shifting, from cognition to metacognition, A review of the literature indicates that such metacognitive instruction on strategy use usually has a positive effect on both L1 and L2 readers' comprehension performance.In China, few researches have been conducted in this area although there are extensive theoretical discussions concerning the effects and feasibility of metacognitive instruction in ESL reading, especially few researches have done on a group of TV universities' students.A survey was conducted in Xuzhou TV University and Suqian TV University. The qualitative data obtained from the questionnaires and reading comprehension tests were transcribed and analyzed. Correlative analysis and T-test were run by using SPSS. The results showed that the metacognitive awareness of these less capable students in ESL reading was low, and their reading comprehension performance were closely related with their level of metacognitive awareness . Based on these results, an experiment was carried out to testify the hypothesis that less capable TV students benefit more from metacognitive instruction on strategy use than strategy only instruction in ESL reading class. After a six-month training,students receiving different instructions were required to take part in a posttest, and the results were compared with those of the pretest. It proved that metacognitive instruction enhanced students' abilities of strategy use and their reading comprehension achievements are significantly more than those under strategy only instruction.