A Study On The Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On EFL Reading For College English Majors

Due to the importance of reading among the basic foreign language skills, how to improve students' English reading proficiency has long been a common concern for both researchers and FL teachers. In the early times, great attention had been paid to the study of various teaching methodologies in order to find the most efficient one. However, there seemed to be no way out, because there is no perfect methodology to everyone when they are treated as individuals. It was not until 1960s that the focus of research shifted from "how to teach" to "how to learn". For the first time, it was widely acknowledged that training students how to read was even more important.The quintessence of metacognitive theory is to emphasize the students' self-awareness and self-monitoring, and students are asked to monitor their cognitive process to reach an automatic degree. Based on the Flavell's metacognitive theory and O'Malley's classification of metacognitive strategies, the study, with a practical designed instructional model, attempts to explore the effects of metacognitive strategy training on EFL reading. A lot of studies abroad have verified the positive effects of metacognition on reading, but they are not true for the EFL readers of China. The related research in China is still at an exploratory stage, and few studies contributed to the effects of metacognitive strategy training on EFL reading. Different from previous research projects, the present study chooses English majors as subjects, and integrates the metacognitive strategy training into regular EFL reading class to testify the effects of metacognitive strategy training on EFL reading. Therefore, there is a great significance for the present study.With a pretest-posttest control group design, sixty-three second year college English majors from two classes of Gansu Lianhe University participated in the experiment over one semester. A treatment of integrated metacognitive strategy training is administered to the experimental group, and its performance is compared with that of the control group which has not received such treatment. The data involved in the experiment are the pretest and posttest from a set of questionnaire, two reading tests for the two groups. The collected data are processed with SPSS11.5. The results of statistics indicate that metacognitive strategy training leads to the enhancement of the students' metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, the change of their passive reading habits, and thereby leads to the improvement of their EFL reading performance.Based on the major findings of the study, some implications are provided for the teaching of reading: reading performance can be improved through raising students' awareness of strategy use, fostering students' autonomy, embedding metacognitive strategy training in regular reading class, and adjusting teachers' roles. It is necessary to note that the present study has its limitations as far as its scopes and conditions are concerned, which can be the points for further studies.