An Empirical Study On Instruction Of Metacognitive And Cognitive Strategies In College English Vocabulary Learning

Since the later 1970s, a gradual but marked shift from teaching methods to learning strategies has taken place in the field of language acquisition research. Language learning strategy and its instruction has turned into a hotspot issue of foreign language teaching. And among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy has a pivotal role which fills a unique niche in the self-regulatory phylum that enables individuals to coordinate their own learning process. Several distinct research streams are converging in the positive roles of metacognitive strategy instruction on second language learning, and related research has been conducted in the field of four language skills. However, limited empirical research has been available to scrutinize the relationship between metacognitive strategy training and second language vocabulary learning in the literature, much less a combined study with cognitive strategy.This thesis attempts to probe into the issue of college English vocabulary instruction for sophomores in Hunan Institute of Engineering. It is to be approached from the following two aspects: metacognitive and cognitive strategies; strategies- based instruction (SBI). The former provides a theoretical basis for this study, while the latter presents a research framework and model. The research aims to answer the following question: How to apply metacognitive and cognitive strategies instruction to college students'English vocabulary learning.The design for this study is a quasi-experimental research involving two classes of sophomores in Hunan Institute of Engineering: one class of 30 students who receive 10 week's metacognitive and cognitive strategies instruction comprised the experimental group; the other class of 30 students serves as the control group and attends traditional English vocabulary classes. Three metacognitive strategies are instructed for promoting the construction and acquisition of metacognitive awareness. These include planning, monitoring and evaluating strategies; useful cognitive vocabulary strategies (such as encoding strategy, contextual-guessing strategy) are also employed to serve as complement. Pretest and posttest are conducted before and after the training with a vocabulary size test and a vocabulary proficiency test, respectively.The same questionnaire is distributed to students at the time of pretest and posttest respectively to examine the subjects'employment of metacognitive and cognitive strategies in learning vocabulary.Data collected from the research are analyzed by SPSS 13.0. Qualitative research method like interview is also used to explore learner's English learning autonomy variation.The results of the data indicate: First and foremost, the analysis results of questionnaires and test papers reveal that the experimental group outperforms the control group in English vocabulary size and proficiency after the experiment. Secondly, with regard to the different impact on high-level language proficiency group and low-level group, the latter gains much more benefits (t=-10.71, p<0.001), while less significant change is found in the high-level language proficiency group. Last but not the least, this instruction is conducive to the promotion of learner's autonomy and improvement of their overall English level.The study explores the effectiveness of the integrative classroom training model and demonstrates that metacognitive and cognitive strategies instruction is feasible for English vocabulary learning. Research results indicate that SBI makes students become more efficient in completing classroom language tasks, and gain more confidence in their ability to learn and use the target language.