Metacognition Applied In Senior English Reading Teaching

Research on language learning strategies is attracting more and more attention from linguists from all over the world. Flavell, O'Malley, Chamot and Oxford are among these prominent researchers, who categorized and expounded language learning strategies scientifically and systematically from different angles. Based on them, quite a number of studies on metacognition have been conducted both at home and abroad. However, these studies on metacognition have been carried out either in English as a second language setting or focusing on general English learning. Scanty attention has been paid to investigating Chinese senior middle school students' metacognition in their reading processes and reading achievements. Besides, senior middle school students often encounter many problems in reading. They seldom employ metacognitive strategies to help them to improve their reading proficiency. Taking all these into consideration, this thesis presents an empirical study on metacognition in the Chinese setting where English is a foreign language. It's mainly intended to justify the hypothesis that reading achievements may positively correlate with metacognitive levels. Another aim of this study is to probe into the factors influencing Chinese senior school students' metacognitive development. This study reveals the following:1. Senior middle school students have only developed their reading metacognition to a certain extent. They have good metacognitive knowledge but with weak motivational beliefs and poor self-regulation.2. There is significant difference of reading metacognition between excellent students and poor ones. Excellent students tend to use a greater variety of strategies and employ them more frequently than poor ones.3. Both teachers and students tend to adopt "bottom-up" model in teaching and reading.4. The limited time for autonomous learning is a crucial factor influencing Chinese students' development of metacognition.Thus, this study concludes that effective reading involves metacognition, which...