| In recent years, the concept of meta-cognitive strategy has been attracting wider and wider attention, and more and more importance has been attached to the development in using meta-cognitive strategies. The use of meta-cognitive strategies involves an ability of consciously using meta-cognitive knowledge and performs to plan, monitor and evaluate learning process. A lot of researches have shown that students who have mastered meta-cognitive strategies usually perform better than those who have not in language development such as listening, reading, speaking and writing. For example, reading development is strongly related to the use of meta-cognitive strategies. Reading comprehension is one of the important skills and one of the ultimate goals in foreign language learning. Reading as a process of psycholinguistic activity, readers should combine their knowledge or schema with the textual information in the process of planning, recognizing, guessing, inferring, proving, monitoring and evaluating. In this active process, strategies involved affect the process of reading comprehension, and the reader should intentionally regulate and control the reading process and adopt appropriate strategies to solve the problems during it. Meta-cognitive strategies are more universally applicable through focus upon planning,monitoring and evaluating the process of reading in order to ensure that the reading goal can be reached. So there is no doubt that there exists a direct relationship between English reading and meta-cognitive strategies.The purpose of the paper is to investigate the use of meta-cognitive strategies in reading by junior high school students. One hundred junior high school students and three teachers in Yongji county of Jilin Province participated in the study. The students completed data sets that were examined for questionnaire and interviews which were presented in Chinese. The questionnaire included three categories of meta-cognitive strategies: planning, monitoring, and self-evaluation. All subjects were asked to produce self-reported use of meta-cognitive strategies when they are reading. Interview of teachers and students contain some related questions in order to find out some information that questionnaire can not encompass. The results indicated that junior high students use low overall meta-cognitive reading strategies. More specifically, students only use a little planning strategy; monitoring and self-evaluation strategies are the least often employed. The results also indicated that junior high students don't understand how to use meta-cognitive strategies to help their reading. For this, the researcher continues to analyze the reasons why students use a few meta-cognitive strategies in term of attitude, awareness, autonomy, the backwash effect of tests and strategy training. Finally, pedagogical implications are suggested. First of all, teachers need to incorporate methods to teach these meta-cognitive strategies directly and explicitly to students. It is necessary to carry out meta-cognitive strategy training to teach students what meta-cognitive strategies are and how to use meta-cognitive strategies appropriately and effectively. Also, teachers need to guide and discipline students for the use of meta-cognitive strategies. Thus, the study will continue in two directions: the use of meta-cognitive strategies in other junior high schools, and how to improve effective use of meta-cognitive strategies. It is hoped that this paper and further work can make contributions to the teaching of English reading in China, and offer some insights into EFL reading instruction and meta-cognitive strategy training in China. |
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