A Study On Improving Non-English Majors' Learner Autonomy Through Metacognitive Strategy Training

Over the last two decades, fostering learner autonomy has become a chief concern in the field of foreign language teaching. To motivate and foster language learners' autonomous learning ability has become a primary objective of pedagogy and has already been integrated into the pedagogical goals of language teaching and learning. A great number of researchers home and abroad have done much research on learner autonomy from different perspectives. In order to foster students' learner autonomy, they have proposed many different approaches, which are mainly by way of strategy training. Previous studies mostly focus on comprehensive learning strategies, including metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective strategies and stress their overall influence on language learning proficiency. Studies with focus on metacognitive strategy training are still rare. Wenden (1985) believes that learning strategy is the key to facilitating learner autonomy while the key to learning strategy is metacognition. In order to explore the effects of metacognitive strategy training on learner autonomy and language proficiency, the author conducted a one-semester metacognitive strategy training among college non-English majors.Based on related literature, a one-semester teaching program was carried out among 97 students of Shandong Vocational College of Finance. 46 students were in the experimental class and 51 students were in the comparison class. Instruments adopted in the present study included tests, questionnaires, learner profiles and follow-up interviews. During the training process, subjects of the experimental class received metacognitive strategy training while subjects in the comparison class followed the traditional way of teaching. The metacognitive strategy training involved in-classroom training and extracurricular reinforcement and mainly focused on three metacognitive strategies—setting goals and planning, monitoring and evaluation. Before the training, subjects in the experimental class were required to construct learner profiles, which included learner contracts, weekly learning journals and self-evaluation sheets. Subjects were required to enrich their learner profiles by regularly making plans and setting goals according to their own situation, monitoring and evaluating their English study. Learner profiles were checked by the teacher on a regular basis.Before and after the metacognitive strategy training, pre-test and post-test on subjects' language proficiency, metacognitive strategy employment and learner autonomy level were conducted in the experimental class and the comparison class respectively. The data were processed through SPSS 10.0 for Windows. Independent-samples T-test and Paired-samples T-test were performed to evaluate the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy training. The results of both quantitative studies and qualitative studies reveal that metacognitive strategy training has effectively improved the subjects' employment of metacognitive strategies, learner autonomy and language proficiency. In the end, some pedagogical implications of the present study are drawn and the limitations and further research suggestions are mentioned.