An Empirical Study Of Metacognitive Strategy Use In English Reading Comprehension

Since Flavell (1976) put forward the concept of metacognition, a growing number of researches have been conducted which deepen our understanding of the two basic components of metacognition: its knowledge and its strategies. Thus, studies in the field can be divided into these two categories. On the one hand, there are a lot of studies examining the scope of metacognitive knowledge with an intention to raise metacognitive awareness among learners. On the other hand, many investigations probe into the importance of metacognitive strategy use in learning and its relationship with learners' task performances. In the field of Chinese EFL teaching and learning, the study of metacognitive strategy has become an integral part of research on language learning strategies (LLS) worldwide, a substantial number of descriptive and intervention studies appear in recent years. For English learners in the Chinese context, reading is one of the most important means of language input as well as knowledge acquisition, so the importance of metacognition and the use of metacognitive strategies in English reading comprehension deserve a lot of deeper investigations.This thesis reports on a data-based research into the use of metacognitive strategies in English reading comprehension. The research is devoted to Chinese students at tertiary level in the Chinese context. The subjects of the study are first-year non-English majors from a key university in Mainland China. The data are collected through a questionnaire survey and an English term paper.The results of the study reveal that: (1) Chinese non-English majors use various kinds of metacognitive strategies in reading comprehension with a relatively low-frequency level; (2) Chinese non-English majors with higher language proficiency tend to use metacognitive strategies more frequently in reading comprehension; and (3) Female students have higher frequency of using metacognitive strategy than male students; (4) Students with different academic majors have different choice of metacognitive strategies, especially between humanities majors and science majors; (5) Students tend to use more metacogntive strategy in test times than in non-test times and (6) There is no correlation between metacognitive strategy use and scores in the part of reading comprehension, but the correlation between strategy use and the result of the overall test is clearly seen.