| The metacognition theory, of which the researching area is mainly concerned with the cognitive field, and its application have become an important researching field in the study of cognition psychology and the education and development psychology. And in the present teaching environment calling for quality-oriented education, to cultivate the students'reading strategies and skills and to develop their effective reading abilities are the important aims of a highly effective English teaching. But the problems we are faced with is that most of the cognitive theories we can at present study are often expounding their views from the aspects of language learners whose mother tongue is English, while they seldom refer to such a situation as that in China: in Chinese senior high schools, the teaching environment of English as a foreign language, is such that students usually study English only by reading and writing without the real English environment, which inevitably causes a far-from-effective result. This thesis is a tentative study of improving students'reading proficiency from the viewpoint of the metacognitive strategy training. In the early times,great attention had been paid to the study of various teaching methodologies in order to find the most effective one. However,there seemed to be no way out. For one thing, none of the methodologies can be said to be perfect. For another,there is no perfect methodology to everyone,if students are really treated as individuals. It was not until the 1960s that the focus of research shifted from"how to teach"to"how to learn". For the first time, it was widely acknowledged that training students how to read was even more important. Nowadays, the number of the students is always on the rise. As a result, teachers have to face a class of 40 to 60 students, whose English reading proficiency varies a lot. In order to adapt to the new teaching environment and to achieve the educational objective, teachers should consider how to foster students'ability to read independently. Drawing on the research on learning strategies at home and abroad, this thesis finally decides on the fostering of metacognitive strategies and probes how to integrate metacognitive strategies into English reading teaching for senior high school students.In order to test whether or not metacognitive-strategy-based classroom instruction can help to foster independent English reading and improve students'reading proficiency,the author carried out a 12-week long teaching program based on metacognitive strategies among the 100 students in Grade One of Senior High School Attached to Northeast Normal University. Before the programme, a questionnaire based on Oxford's strategy inventory for language learning was used to assess the students'current use of metacognitive strategies. During this programe, metacognitive strategy fostering was integrated into classroom teaching. First of all, students were not only provided with necessary metacognitive knowledge about English reading but also to reflect their own strength and weakness. Students were made to realize that their reading comprehension should always be seen as a kind of process–an active search for meaning process; a process of application of different kinds of knowledge, a strategic process and an interactive process. This kind of process needed planning, monitoring and evaluating and eventually revising to ensure improved reading performance.The result suggests that the English reading level of the Chinese high school students can be much improved by means of giving them the metacognitive strategy training in English reading. To truly improve students'metacognitive level in English reading, it is not enough only to teach them metacognitive strategies in classes. Teachers should also encourage students to do a lot of reading after class, and guide them to consciously apply the acquired metacognitive strategies to practical reading process so as to make students understand how to, when to and where to make use of the metacognitive strategies.
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