An Interventional Study On Unsuccessful English Major Readers' Metacognitive Strategies

Metacognitive strategies have been attracting wider attention in the case of foreign language learning. Nowadays numerous researchers have found that these strategies are closely related to students' English reading achievement. .By a brief review of previous studies on metacognitive strategies instruction in reading, we find that metacognitive strategies are essential to reading learning because they enable students to understand their reading tasks, apply effective reading strategies and control and regulate their reading process better.The current paper aims to study whether metacognitive strategies instruction to Chinese English major students will improve their English reading performance. The researcher conducted a case study (on 8 subjects) by means of interventional research, training metacognitive strategies to unsuccessful readers and instructing them to use metacognitive strategies properly in English reading practice, and then tried to find whether their English reading proficiency improves or not.After 12 weeks' interventional study, the results showed that both metacognitive strategies status and English reading proficiency of the subjects improved, and that these two factors were significantly correlated with each other. The instruction of metacognitive strategies and the interventional assistance of the researcher in this study have been proved to be feasible and effective by enhancing students' understandings and awareness of using metacognitive strategies in their English reading learning.