A Study Of Metacognitive Awareness Of English Reading Strategies Used By Senior Middle School Students

Metacognition, or awareness of the process of learning, is an important concept in cognitive theory. It's about self-reflection, self-responsibility and initiative. A number of studies have found a positive correlation between metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and fluent reading. Then the study on how the Chinese senior middle school students use reading strategies while reading will be of great value.The aim of the study is to provide a picture of the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies of a group of Chinese senior high school students. It is intended to find out whether the Chinese senior middle school students'metacognitive knowledge of reading strategies has close links to their reading proficiency and how the students use metacognitive strategies while reading. Participants were 230 students in the second year of their studies. They were administered to complete the Survey of Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies of Chinese Senior Middle School Students.The questionnaire, which is developed from Mokhtari & Sheorey's Metacognitve Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), aims to reveal the type of strategies respondents report using when reading academic materials in English. All the data were entered into SPSS 13.0 for Windows for statistical analysis.The results of the study show that on the whole there is a moderate awareness of all the strategies included in the survey. The students hold a preference for problem solving strategies, followed by global and support strategies. Not unexpectedly, the factors that correlate with strategy awareness are gender and English proficiency. But female students did not report higher usage than males in all categories as well as the overall strategy use. For only two of the 30 strategy statements the female students show greater awareness of reading strategies (that is, reporting higher frequency of usage). Those participants, who were regarded successful readers, reported a higher use in 20 of the 30 reading strategies than did those students who were considered to be readers of low ability.There are some practical implications according to the research findings. First, teachers should help students think about their learning and reading processes and then give them encouragement to build up their confidence to use their reported strategic knowledge in linguistic analysis. One way of doing so is to pair students' metacognitive knowledge with their use of strategies in real reading situations. Second, teachers can incorporate some elements of strategy instruction into their English reading instruction, teach students some of the basic reading strategies and guide them to pick up some of the strategies. Teachers should tailor reading programmes according to students'abilities and needs. Third, As to their preference for certain strategies, teachers should try to improve students' ability to reflect on reading strategy use, balance their strategy use and eventually make them automatically strategic readers. Finally, teachers should be aware of the difference by the effect of gender and try to narrow the gap of reading strategy use by different genders.