An Experimental Study Of Meta-cognitive Strategy Training In Senior High Extra-curricular English Reading

With the new requirement for English extra-curricular reading amount put forward by the New Curriculum Standards (NCS) for Senior High Middle School English in 2001, the importance of the extra-curricular reading was recognized by more and more middle school English teachers in China. However, they seldom conduct the real extra-curricular reading activities among students due to the stress of the test-oriented school situation. Even among those teachers who do conduct such practices, they tend only to assign students to read some books after class and don't provide the needed guidance and supervision based on students' real reading abilities. In this case, the extra-curricular reading has not affected students' English learning in positive ways. There are two reasons for this kind of condition. First, the English teachers don't have enough time to conduct the extra-curricular reading activities. Second, the English teachers don't have effective reading strategies to guide students' extra-curricular reading. The latter one is more important. Therefore, finding effective reading strategies for the Senior High School English teachers to help the students with their extra-curricular reading is highly necessary. To improve this situation, the authoress of this thesis decided to incorporate meta-cognitive strategies into the extra-curricular reading activities and carried out a four-month experimental research to work out a set of effective meta-cognitive strategies for senior high students to handle reading in Haidian Experimental Middle School. The experiment includes the following aspects: define the reading ability of senior one student in this school; analyze the meta-cognitive strategies used by them; give meta-cognitive reading strategy training to students for their extra-curricular reading and measure the students' progress in reading proficiency."Meta-cognition" was first put forward by an American psychologist John Flavell in his book Cognitive Development. This concept has been frequently used in the psychological field in nearly twenty years. It also becomes a key research question in the learning strategies. And many researchers put forward some meta-cognitive strategies based on this concept. Meta-cognitive strategies are a series of skills used with a particular meta-cognitive knowledge in mind. Meta-cognitive strategies refer to the learning strategies that require planning for learning, thinking about the learning as it is taking place, monitoring one's production or comprehension, and evaluating learning after an activity is completed. O'Malley & Chamot(2001) define them as "higher order executive skills that entail planning for, monitoring, or evaluating the success of a learning activity". According to the different theories and types of meta-cognitive strategies (MS) put forward by the previous researchers, the authoress designed her own meta-cognitive reading strategies( MRS) training model that was suggested to be more suitable for the senior high school students and testified its effectiveness in a four-month experiment with the students' extra-curricular reading in Haidian Experimental Middle School.With the help of two teaching staff members in the Experimental School, Ms. Wang Caiyan and Ms. Xueping, eighty-four students were arranged to participate in this experiment, among whom, the experimental group consisted of forty-three students while the control group had forty-one students, both group were assessed academically as equal senior high English starters. The experimental group was trained in meta-cognitive strategy-based approach, involving both meta-cognitive strategies and cognitive strategies, while the control group was not trained in any meta-cognitive strategies. All the subjects were required to take two tests, the pre-test and the post-test, before and after the training. All the data were analyzed by the software SPSS.The results indicate that the meta-cognitive reading strategies can effectively facilitate learning strategy awareness and use; Meta-cognitive reading strategy training is an effective way to promote learners' reading ability and to help students form good reading habits in their extra-curricular reading; In their extra-curricular reading, the students who used the meta-cognitive reading strategies can plan, monitor and evaluate their own reading process; besides, these students also can adjust their reading plans and strategies according to their weakness and improvement. Apart from the improvement in their reading ability, they have also improved a lot in other aspects, such as vocabulary learning, writing and so on.