The Effect Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Reading Comprehension And Metacognitive Awareness For English Majors In Vocational College-An Experimental Study On English Majors Of ZJITC

Metacognition, firstly proposed by American psychologist Flavell in 1970s, has become a much concerning topic in educational psychology ever since. According to the theory, metacognition is simply defined as thinking about thinking, which means the individual could monitor, control, evaluate, and regulate his cognitive strategies to gain the purposes in a cognitive way. On the other hand, reading is claimed as a guessing game by Goodman, which infers that reading comprehension is a process in which the reader constructs the meaning based on the information from the visual text and his relevant background knowledge. However, more researches have been done to prove that metacongition is in close relation with reading comprehension and metacogntive strategy falls within the scope of effective learning strategies. Therefore, the present experimental investigation conducted by the author is to prove the relationship of metacognitive strategy and reading comprehension or metacognitive knowledge.Two questions are to be answered in this investigation. One is"what is the present status of metacognitive knowledge among higher vocational college English-major students in reading?"The other is"What are the effects of metacognitive strategy training on reading competence and metacognitive knowledge?"In compliance with these problems to solve, questionnaires and reading tests are arranged to 63 students, who major in English in Zhejiang Industry & Trade Polytechnic, to accomplish. The data regarding metacognitive knowledge and reading proficiency are collected. Afterwards, all the data are put into computer to analyze through SPSS V 14.0.After the experiment, some findings are displayed: metacogntive strategy training is helpful to improve metacognitive knowledge; metacognitive strategy indeed plays an important role in reading proficiency; direct learning strategy training has positive impact on reading performance.This research, like any similar research, cannot avoid its limitations in supplying more convincing findings and leave more space for further researches in the future. The real value of metacognitive strategy should be worked over constantly and its applications have to be explored by more researchers.