The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Reading Teaching In Higher Vocational Colleges

In recent years, with the opinion that learners should be the center of learning activities firmly rooted in the educational field, research on foreign language teaching has shifted from "how to teach" to "how to learn", which mainly focuses on identifying the learning strategies used by good language learners, and less effective learners are expected to use those useful strategies identified to assist their learning. However, many empirical studies find that the applicability and validity of learning strategies are not universal, less effective learners have got few results just by simply and mechanically imitating good language learners' strategies. Then the question arising in strategy research is how to help learners know themselves as a learner and know learning as a process, how to guide them to try and choose the most efficient learning strategies for themselves.According to the strategy application characteristics of the students in higher vocational colleges, the author of the thesis argues that metacognitive strategy training should be integrated into English classroom teaching in higher vocational colleges to improve classroom teaching efficiency and develop students' awareness of independent learning. Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategies are at a higher level than other strategies such as cognitive strategies, social affective strategies, which are the regulatory measures adopted by learners for successfully learning a foreign language. The substance of metacognitive strategy training is to help less efficient learners know about the learning process and identify difficulties in their language learning by introspection, and then choose the most suitable strategies for themselves.In order to further verify the effects of metacognitive strategies on English learning of the students in higher vocational colleges, the author chose reading, the most important skill for the students, as her study focus and carried out an 18-week training program in Hunan Railway Institution of Science and Technology (a higher vocational college where she taught). The subjects were 60 IT majors from two intact classes in Grade one. One class of 30 that received metacognitive strategy as well as cognitive strategy instruction comprised experimental group; the other class of 30 served as comparison group, receiving cognitive strategy instruction without metacognitive strategies. Both the experimental and the com- parison group followed the syllabus of the college. Through the study, the auhtor was to answer these questions: 1) Does metacognitive strategy training improve the students awareness of strategy application? 2) Does metacognitive strategy training improve the students' reading proficiency? 3) How does metacognitive strategies affected cognitive strategy application? 4) Do the students' beliefs and attitudes towards English learning undergo any changes as a result of the training, and to what extent?Findings from the analysis of the data collected throughout the training are as following:1) Metacognitive strategy training has a positive effect on the students' reading proficiency. The two groups who bear little significance at the beginning have achieved differences in reading proficiency tests by the end of the training. The experimental group has made a better improvement in the last test than the comparison group. 2) Metacognitive strategy training also has a positive effect on the students' awareness of strategy application. The two groups manifest differences in the frequency of overall strategy application, especially in planning and monitoring strategies.3) Metacognitive strategies play important roles in cognitive strategies training. To some extent, it is the continuously monitoring and evaluating roles of metacognitive strategies that help cognitive strategies transfer to new learning tasks and maintain their using over time. This further explains why the experimental group outperformed the comparison group in the first two aspects.4) Learner's beliefs and attitudes exhibit positive changes in the experimental group, most of the students have learned how to plan and manage their own learning. On the contrary, positive attitudes in the comparison group tend to lapse into dubiety with no metacognitive training.From above, it can be concluded that applying metacognitive strategies to English reading teaching in higher vocational colleges is not only necessary but also practical. Metacognitive strategies play a crucial role in reading, which enables students to be more aware of themselves as readers, to better understand reading tasks, to apply reading strategies appropriately. Most important of all, once students master the metacognitive strategies, they will learn how to learn, which will benefit them all their life.