An Investigation Into The Relation Between The Instruction Of Metacognitive Regulation And English Reading Ability Of Senior High Students In China

John Flavell firstly introduced the notion of "metacognition" in the early 1970s while he was studying the "metamemory". He argues mat metacognition is the subject's recognition to his or her current cognitive activity. This recognition involves static metacognitive knowledge as well as dynamic metacognitive activity (or self-regulation). Much attention has been given to this theory especially in the domain of reading by researchers in educational psychology ever since it was created. Though there have been more theoretical researches, the empirical studies concerning English reading in China and metacognition and metacognitive regulation in particular are left untouched. The present study mainly consists two parts: 1) the correlation between metacognitive regulation and senior high students' FL reading ability; 2) the difference between subjects with instructions of metacognitive regulations and subjects without any instructions.By using questionnaires, classroom instructions and statistics calculation, the study has had the following findings:Metacognitive regulation is closely related to English reading, and instructions of metacognitive regulation can enhance reading ability.Moreover, this study further proves that in the reading process there is another set of strategies operating at a different level. These are metacognitive regulation processes including an awareness of what one is doing, the strategies one is employing and an ability to manage and regulate consciously the appropriate reading strategies in different situations. It is an unquestioned fact that readers showed, more or less, in their reading the ability of metacognitive regulation, and readers who got higher scores in reading test are mostly able to better regulate their reading processes and are more likely to revise their strategies.The significance of this study to teaching lies in the fact that metacognitive regulation ability can be improved via classroom instructions. Teacher can integrate in their teaching the training of various metacognitive regulation strategies and topromote the transfer of metacognitive strategies to new tasks.