The Effect Of Metacognitive Strategy On Less Successful Students In Oral English Learning

Learning strategies have aroused growing interests and evoked extensive studies in the field of second language learning and teaching over the past three decades. The point of view that learning strategy is one of the decisive factors in language learning has been approved by many linguists. The large number of studies in the field of second language learning gradually proved that strategy training played an very positive role in listening, speaking, reading, writing and even vocabulary memorizing. However, the necessity and feasibility of strategy training remains a controversial issue among English teachers, and the practice of strategy training, especially metacognitive strategy training, is far from common in college English teaching in China.Metacognitive strategy is a learning strategy, or a self-regulation strategy to improve learning capacity by means of paying attention, making plans, arranging and evaluating. Such self-regulation strategy plays a vital role in developing learner's autonomy, and their training is now generally believed to be an effective way to improve strategy use and language proficiency. The research on metacognitive strategies has been increasing over the past 20 years. However, the research on it, especially on spoken English training is still in an embryonic stage compared with the research on other learning strategies.This paper sets out to obtain some evidence in this aspect by means of research and experiment with the expectation to investigate the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy training in spoken English.Based on the definition and classification of Oxford's metacognitive strategy, the researcher made an experiment among 95 second-year students majored in English from two classes (class A and class B) in Xi'an Fanyi University by applying a training model from the integration of Oxford's Eight-Step Model with Weaver & Cohen's Strategies-Based Instruction. By the first spoken English test, 20 less successful students in class A, the contrast class, is chosen as the contrast group, and 22 less successful students in class B, the treatment class, is chosen as the treatment group. And then metacognitive strategy training is conducted to the treatment class for a whole semester with questionnaire, self-evaluation data sheet, learning diary and tests as the research tools, and SPSS software as statistic tools.Finally, some specific pedagogical implications for metacognitive strategy training are discussed, and corresponding limitations and suggestions are included in order to improve English learning.The comparison results and changes of the quantitative data and the qualitative data of the treatment group itself and the treatment group to the contrast group before and after training indicate that the training can greatly enhance metacognitive strategy use frequency and the oral English proficiency of the less successful learners is evidently improved.