The Impact Of Metacognitive Strategies Training On English Self-efficacy

In the field of second language teaching and learning during the past few decades, learning strategies have been attracting people's interests.Researches concerning learning strategies and their training began in the 1970s in the western countries and 1980s in China. As one part of learning strategies,metacognitive strategies have been proved to be the higher-order executive skill,which play a critical role in language learning.Researches on metacognitive strategies and their training have proved that metacognitive strategies are closely related with English achievements,and most researches are conducted to explore metacognitive strategies training on either general English learning,or specific English skills such as reading,listening,writing,speaking,pronunciation and vocabulary.Yet,so far,most of the trainings are proved to be related with English performance or performance of specific skills as evidence for their effectiveness.However,the improvement of English performance is not the only way to judge the effectiveness of metacognitve strategies trainings.Strategy training can be either long term or short term.For long term training,the aim is to improve language achievements;and for short term training,the major task is to raise the awareness of strategy use,give learners full explanation and practice opportunity and make them confident about themselves as learners so as to keep using these strategies to achieve better achievements in further study.Thus,the trainer designs the present research to give metacognitive strategies training to eight preparatory college students in an "after-class cooperative learning group",and to explore the impact of this training on subjects' English self-efficacy.Eight subjects participated in this "after-class cooperative learning group" and received metacognitive strategies training for 10 weeks during summer vacation.Questionnaires and interviews are conducted both before and after training.Besides,learner profiles are established for each subject to report on their goal,plan,performance,self-monitoring and self-evaluation.Learner differences are also taken into consideration in this study.Both quantitative results and qualitative results are analyzed and major findings are as follows:First,seven subjects' use of metacognitive strategies and six subjects' English self-efficacy improved after training,which proves the effectiveness of this training,and the impact of this training on English self-efficacy;Second,this "after-class cooperative learning group" is effective for the training of metacognitive strategies,and third,learner differences are necessary parts to be considered in metacognitive strategies training.