An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Learner Autonomy

Learning is a lifelong process. Most of the educational researchersbelieve that the ultimate goal of education is to foster students' learnerautonomy and make them autonomous learners.Therefore, manyapproaches were put forward to develop students'learner autonomy.Among the approaches, learner training of strategy use has become theimportant one and the metacognitive strategy as a part of learningstrategy becomes part of strategy studies in language teaching andlearning. Wenden(1985) believes that learning strategy is the key tofacilitating learner autonomy while the key of learning strategy ismetacognition. Wang Duqin(2002a)also holds the same opinion thatfostering students" metacognition is the main channel to develop Students'leaner autonomy. However, previous studies usually focused on thedescription and classification of learning strategies or investigating therelationship between strategy application and the results of second orforeign language learning. Even though there're studies concerninglearner training, they often involve comprehensive strategy training,namely, metacognitive, cognitive, and social/affective strategies. Strategytraining with its focus on metacognition is rare, especially at tertiary levelin China. According to Pang Weiguo(2003a), learners are just in lack ofmetacognitive strategies, not to mention using them appropriately; theycan't effectively deal with affect influence in language learning. Based onthese findings, this study tries to integrate metacognitive strategy traininginto college English teaching to cultivate learner autonomy and explorethe effects of metacognitive training on learner autonomy. It has putforward three hypotheses:1. Metacognitive strategy training can effectively improve students'metacognitive strategy; 2. Metacognitive strategy training can greatly enhance students'learner autonomy;3. Metacognitive strategy training can effectively improve students'language achievement.In order to test the above hypotheses, the author carried out aone-year teaching program based on metacognitive strategies among 60freshmen in Grade 2004 of a certain university with 30 students in theexperimental class and 30 students in the control class. Before theprogram, a questionnaire and an inventory based on the existing literaturewere compiled to assessthe students' metacognitive strategies and learnerautonomy. During this program, metacognitive strategy training wasintegrated into the classroom teaching in the experimental class. First ofall,experimental class students were provided with necessarymetacognitive strategies through the explanation of the teacher, and theywere helped to reflect their own strengths and weaknesses in Englishlearning. Secondly, they were helped to set realizable goals and plans,including short-term plans and long-term plans, and the students had theirown goals and tasks for every English lesson, every day, every week andevery semester. The students were required to form the habit of settinggoals in the class and student weekly monitoring schedule was adopted tohelp the students to plan, monitor and evaluate their own English learning.Students were als0 required to fill in the table every day to monitor theimplementation of the plan. and evaluate their learning. In the classroom,the students used the metacognitive strategy training checklist whichincluded planning, monitoring and evaluating to reflect their own Englishlearning. Thus, metacognitive strategy training was integrated intocollege English teaching.Before and after the training, pretest and posttest on languageproficiency, metacgnitive strategies and learner autonomy wereconducted in the experimental class and control class respectively.The data was keyed into SPSS to do descriptive statistics and paired-samplesT test. The statistical result shows that there were not significantdifferences between the experimental class and the control class onlanguage proficiency, metacognitive strategies and learner autonomybefore the metacognitive training(t＜2.000;P＞0.05) After one-year training,the results reveal that the students in the experimental class wereobviously superior to the students in the control class on languageproficiency, metacognitive strategies and learner autonomy and therewere significant differences between the experimental class and thecontrol class in the above three aspects(t＞2.000;P＜0.05).Therefore,themetacognitive strategy training effectively improved students'metacognitive strategies, learner autonomy and language achievement.Through the training, the students in the experimental class couldeffectively plan their English learning, monitor their English learningprocess and evaluate their English learning results, which enhanced theirEnglish learning confidence and motivation and made them learn autonomously. As a result, they became the real master of their Englishlearning.