Metacognitive Strategy Training In Vocabulary Teaching For High School Students

Successful language learning depends on one's vocabulary in some degree, and mastering a certain amount of words is the guarantee of improving students' ability of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation. Chinese high school students need to build a firm foundation for their further English language learning, and as a result, mastering a sufficient vocabulary is an essential task to accomplish. However, as the English vocabulary is huge in number and lack in regularity, vocabulary learning poses great difficulty for high school students. Besides, lack of self-management and self-monitoring, as well as a vague metacognitive consciousness lead to unsuccessful vocabulary learning. At the same time, lack of metacognitive strategies hinders their employment of other vocabulary cognitive strategies. With all these, high school students need to be instructed in vocabulary learning strategies, especially in vocabulary metacognitive strategy, which is an effective way to enhance students' self-management and facilitate their active development. In China, the newly published High School English Curriculum Standard regards learning strategies as teaching objectives. It has profound significance for the improvement of the students' learning efficiency and teachers' instructions.This thesis aims to prove the validity of metacognitive strategy training in vocabulary teaching on both the theoretical and empirical grounds. The author first conducted a vocabulary metacognitive strategy survey in a public high school where the author works and another key high school in the same city. With the data collected and analyzed, a study of vocabulary metacognitive strategy training is conducted in the former school. The subjects were 149 high school students in two parallel classes with the author as their English teacher. The research data came from the scores of their pre- and post-training vocabulary tests. The result of the study shows that explicit metacognitive strategy training does make significantly long and positive effect on the vocabulary learning of Chinese high school students.