Metacognitive Strategies And College English Teaching Of Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is one of the important skills and one of the ultimate goals in foreign language learning. Reading, among other things, is a process of psycholinguistic activity. In this activity, the reader actively combines his or her knowledge with the textual information in the process of planning, recognizing, guessing, inferring, proving, monitoring and evaluating, etc. In this active process, strategies involved will affect the process of reading comprehension. And the reader should intentionally regulate and control the reading process and adopt appropriate strategies to solve the problems during it. The traditional grammar-translation oriented teaching method for reading tends to overemphasize language form and overlook students'ability to use language. However, since the development of students'autonomy in learning is one ultimate goal of schooling, teachers should think over how to develop students'ability of independent learning.Metacognition, a psychological term, generally refers to an ability to think about one's cognition and to regulate one's mental processing. It is often related to effective learning and to competent performance according to the researchers in the field of second language acquisition research. Since 1980s a number of these studies have pointed out that the way in which learners perceive language may have a significant impact on their learning outcomes. In other words, if learners have knowledge about their cognitive processes, they are more likely to achieve success in learning.In China, it has long been noticed that even when students can read in their second language, much of their reading is not fluent and they are not actively engaged with the text in a meaningful way. Thus, how to improve students' reading ability is always one of the major concerns in second language learning and teaching. Since most of the empirical studies in reading metacognition are conducted in the contexts outside China, whether their findings can be applied to English reading teaching in China remains a problem. Therefore, it is of theoretical and practical significance to conduct English reading research in China within the framework of metacognition.This paper aims to research on English reading comprehension from a metacognitive perspective. The goal of this research is trying to find out the relationship between English reading comprehension and the use of metacognitive strategies and to provide a reference for the English reading curriculum in China.The major findings of this paper are: 1. Chinese college students'metacognitive awareness in their English reading is relatively low. 2. Metacognition has the correlation with reading ability and the impact on EFL reading performance.This research, like any other similar attempts, cannot avoid its limitation in providing more convincing findings and undoubtedly leaves much for improvement with further researches. The real value of metacognitive training should be further substantiated and its application shall be earnestly explored before it is regularly integrated into our curriculum for FL education.