Metacogntive Strategies Training In Teaching English Reading

It is stipulated literally in the Syllabus for High School English Teaching that emphasis should be laid on reading comprehension in senior high school. In extensive reading classes, the teacher is confronted with a compelling challenge as to how to get students to read effectively. Learning strategy is known to be an important content of SLA, and more important is meta-cognitive strategy which, by concept, is the cognition about cognition, a concept invented by the American psychologist Flavell in the early 70s. Meta-cognition involves the subject's knowledge, like his/her own mentality, ability, commission and strategies, and the planning, monitoring, assessing and adjusting of his/her own act of cognition. The application of mate-cognition proves to be effective in helping students with their English learning. As regards the problem of reading speed and comprehension that is common to senior high school students, this paper begins with the conceptualization of meta-cognitive strategy, and proceeds with a detailed analysis of the significance of meta-cognition in English reading and ends with an experiment on meta-cognitive strategy training. Theories of meta-cognition and findings of relevant experiments add up to the revelation that the training of meta-cognitive strategy is an effective way to improve the teaching of English reading.