A Metacognitive Approach To English Reading In Chinese High Schools

It is known that reading comprehension is very important among the basic foreign language skills, and how to improve learners' English reading proficiency and reading level has long been a common concern of researchers and English teachers. In the early times, great attention has been paid to the study of teaching in order to find the most efficient method to improve English reading. However, there are no perfect methodologies so far. In recent years, a gradual shift has taken place in English teaching, resulting in less emphasis on teaching and teachers and more stress on learning and learners, and the focus of research has been shifted from "how to teach" to "how to learn". This change has opened a new way to language education. Then teachers begin to know that training learners how to read is even more important, which is especially true of Chinese middle school students. Nowadays, the class is very large in Chinese middle schools. And owing to the compulsory education, students vary a lot in English proficiency. Therefore, teachers facing the new and complex teaching environment need to consider how to improve learners' ability to read independently. On basis of the research on reading strategies, this paper finally focuses on the training of metacognitive strategies and how to integrate training into middle school English teaching, and puts forward a concrete model of metacognitive training. The major purpose of the present study is to explore the effectiveness of explicit metacognitive strategies training on reading comprehension of the middle school learners.Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is considered as more important than other strategies such as cognitive, affective strategies and so on, since metacognitive strategies involve an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge to plan, arrange, monitor, regulate and evaluate the learning process. In the course of using metacognitive strategies, the learner communicates relevant information to persons responsible for task execution and collects feedback from the performance process to evaluate the success or failure of task execution so as to...