Research On High School Students' Use Of Metacognitive Strategies In English Learning

We have a long history of striving almost totally on the use of traditional teaching methods which focus on imparting knowledge skills and forms of the target language by presenting pieces of the language in carefully graded steps at the cost of teaching students how to learn the language. Although students do pick up some knowledge of how to learn, it is not always the most appropriate type. Instead, many of them develop strategies which are merely concerned with coping with the demands of the school curriculum, of finding ways to meet the requirements imposed by teachers, strategies which will pay off in the classroom situation but serve no useful purpose in later life. It leads to the phenomenon that some students become tired of learning English .The solution to the problem is the application of metacognitive strategies. After analyzing all kinds of factors, we think during high schools, students' personalities, cognitive styles, foreign language learning strategies, self-teaching abilities have basically formed. At this time teachers should concentrate on training their metacognitive strategies. It is the most important factor of increasing students' self-evaluation, realizing their active development and training their competence of metacognitive strategies. In China, the newly published National English Curriculum Standard regards learning strategies as teaching objectives. It has profound significance for improving students' learning efficiency and teachers' instructions.in order to research high school students' use of metacognitive strategies, first teachers must know theoretical systems of metacognition, grasp theoretical basis for nietacognitive strategies and use them to direct students to learn. Teachers should also consider some factors that influence students' use of metacognitive strategies and appropriately deal with relations among four integral parts: students, teachers, teaching task and teaching context.To deal with students' deficiency and inability in using metacognitive strategies, what teachers must do is to teach students how to learn, boosting their confidence, enhancing their self-esteem, helping them set learning goals, carrying out learning plans,organizing an appropriatelearning environment and training their metacognitive awareness in daily English learning so that they are equipped with metacognitive strategies to learn on their own or to learn in class as effectively as possible and make them in control of learning.Training students to become independent learners is a very important goal that English teaching has been pursuing. In the process of teaching and learning, teachers should not only help students acquire language knowledge, but also help them develop competence of metacognitive strategies to become autonomous learners.