A Study On The Relationship Between Metacognitive Strategies And English Reading Proficiency In A Chinese Senior High School

This paper reports an empirical study of the influences of metacognitive strategies on English reading.120 Senior High School students participated in the study. One questionnaire and one Final-term English Examination were used to collect the data. SPSS 15.0 for windows was adopted to analyze the data. The quantitative analyses of the data generated the following major findings:(1) The individual metacognitive strategy usually used by the students is:①Paying attention to notes in the text.The individual strategies that are especially seldom used by the students are:①Setting short-term reading objectives;②Thinking directly in English when reading;③Focusing on understanding the sentence structures;④Paying attention to textual structures;⑤Self-questioning for better understanding;⑥Evaluating whether the reading goals is achieved;⑦Criticizing the point of views in text;⑧Checking how text content fits purpose;⑨Summarizing the text in English.Of the five metacognitive strategy categories, the selective attention strategy category is most favored by the students, and the evaluating strategy category is least favored by them.(2) Metacognitive strategies have meaningfully positive effect on English reading,(3) Both English proficiency and metacognitive strategies can in some way predict English reading achievement, but the former appears to be even more substantial.The findings of this study indicate that metacognitive strategies do have some positive effect on English reading, and offer some insights into EFL reading instruction and metacognitive strategy training in China.