The Effect Of Metacognitive Strategies On L2 Vocabulary Acquisition Of Rural Senior High School Students

Metacognition was firstly used by the American psychologist Flavell in 1976. It is thinking about one's own thinking; it is the knowledge about one's own cognitive system and the essential skill for learning to learn, including metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive control. The concept of metacognitive strategies (MCS) was firstly used by Hosenfeld in 1977.MCS belong to the three kinds of learning strategies in the classification of 0 'Malley and Chamot. Oxford also mentions MCS in his indirect learning strategies. In this thesis, MCS are a sequence of techniques, tactics and devices a learner intentionally uses to acquire knowledge or skills, involving the cognitive goals, one's cognitive capabilities, the relationship between the two and the corresponding cognitive processes.In this research, a questionnaire investigation and a vocabulary aptitude test are carried out on students from Senior Grade Two in Gutian Middle School, a typical rural senior high school in the west of Fujian Province, after which the data are analyzed by means of linguistic statistics. From the analysis, the status quo of rural senior high school students from Grade Two is learned; the significant difference in the employment of MCS between the high-score group and the low-score group is discovered; and the positive correlation between MCS and L2 vocabulary acquisition is also generated. So the positive effect between MCS in L2 vocabulary acquisition of rural senior high school students from Grade Two is testified. Therefore, the skills of how to use MCS deserve more attention during the teaching activities; and rural senior high school students from Grade Two should also be actively involved in learning how to make full use of MCS during L2 vocabulary acquisition.