A Study Of Cognitive Strategies For Senior One Students

In the last few decades, many researchers have been focusing learning strategies .As one of the principle branches of learning strategies, cognitive strategies (CS) have direct relations with the process of learning, especially in recent years ,with the development of education and New National English Syllabus Standard For Basic Education being carried out, CSs are being employed in middle school as a good method of learning English for the students .The author of this thesis carries out a study into the CSs in two classes of Grade One in a senior middle school. In ordinary English teaching, the author integrates listening, speaking, reading and writing with the CSs and carries out a one—semester training on cognitive strategies in an experimental class (EC) .And also, in the form of questionnaire ,some Senior 2 and 3 students from Shandong and Inner Mongolia were chosen to have an investigation about this issue . This study wants to find out: (1) whether the employment of CSs will improve the exam scores of the students; (2) whether the consciousness of using CSs in EC will be higher than that of the controlled class (CC) by way of cognitive strategy training ;(3) whether the effective students will be better at using CSs than the ineffective students in EC; (4) whether the cognitive strategies will contribute to Senior One Englishlearning, helping them successfully fill in the gap between junior middle school and senior middle school and lay a good foundation for the further study of English.There are four parts in this thesis .Part One starts with a brief introduction to the aims and significance of the study ; In Part Two ,we present learning strategies ,cognitive strategies and relevant survey in this regard at home and abroad ; In Part Three , we advance the hypotheses, subjects, instruments as well as the procedure and results of the study . This part also concerns itself with data analysis and discussion, which falls into four steps: in the outset , the descriptive analysis is made to compare the scores of EC and control CC .Further more , the analysis through Z-examination way is used to identify whether the CSs exert a certain influence upon the achievements of post test ,and then the results of employment of cognitive strategies in EC and CC are compared and analyzed to draw a conclusion ; Third, comparisons are conducted to analyze the differences of CSs between effective students and ineffective students .Finally, how CSs are carried out in Shandong and Innermongolia is analyzed and compared .Each analysis is followed by the discussion in respective regard.Based upon the results of data analysis, in Part Four we can conclude that: (1) There are significant differences of exam scores between EC and CC , so the cognitive strategies training is helpful to improve the achievements of thestudents of EC ; (2) The consciousness of using CSs gets further improvement by way of CSs training ;(3) The excellent students are better at using CSs than the ineffective students in EC;(4)The students who are good at using CSs can be more adaptable to the study in senior middle school and their scores are more stable than the ones who are not.