Developing Metacognitive Strategy Through Learning Journals

Recent years witness an upsurge of extensive investigation by many famous researchers and educationalists (Rubin, Oxford, Ellis, Wen Qiufang and so on ) into learning strategies, especially metacognitive strategies. The previous research has revealed that the students' ability to understand and control cognitive processes, namely, the use of metacognitive strategies, can be developed with the help of teachers. This promising discovery seems to have shed some light on contemporary English teaching and learning in China which aims at developing autonomous learners and problem-solvers. It has also motivated the author to hypothesize that English teachers in senior middle school will be able to develop learners' metacognitive strategies by guiding and getting them keeping learning journal.The present study begins with the definition of metacognition and the components of metacognitive strategies. Then it reports an experiment with two groups (experimental and control one) of subjects in the same teaching curriculum. The results of the experiment show that most students in the experimental group, after one year's strategy training, have enhanced metacognitive awareness and their abilities to use metacognitive strategies have also been improved to different extent. Therefore, it is hoped that the study on developing learners' metacognitive strategies will be of practical significance and help learners to improve their learning autonomy.