An Experimental Study On Metacognitive Training In The EFL Reading Of Junior High School Students

The term"Metacognition"was first proposed by Flavell in his study of metamemory in 1970s. Literally, metacognition is defined as"cognition about cognition"or"thinking about thinking". It includes when you know something or when you do not; being able to choose when and how to use a certain strategy to learn. In a word, metacognition is the monitoring system of one's cognitive process. Flavell's model divided metacognition into four classes of phenomena: a) metacognitive knowledge, b) metacognitive experience, c) goals or tasks, and d) actions or strategies. Metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies are two separate and distinct components of the broader notion of metacognition. Metacognitive knowledge refers to information learners acquire about their learning, while metacognitive strategies are general skills through which learners manage, direct, regulate, guide their learning.Reading is a process to gain information and construct meanings from literal symbol. An effective reading process is a cognitive process as well as a metacognition-involved process. Reading comprehension is one of the important skills and one of the ultimate goals in foreign language learning. Reading, among other things, is a process of psycholinguistic activity. In this activity, the reader actively combines his or her knowledge with the textual information in the process of planning, recognizing, guessing, inferring, proving, monitoring and evaluating, etc. In this active process, strategies involved will 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.Metacognition has been a very much-concerned topic in educational psychology for the past two decades. Many inspiring findings have been made by researchers abroad. But in domestic, the study on this field is very limited. Aware of this lacking, the author carried out the present study to explore some questions in this area. Firstly, the author attempts to describe the general situation of junior high school students'metacognitive knowledge; and secondly a training experiment was carried out to answer the following two questions: 1. Whether Chinese junior high school students'EFL (English as a foreign language) reading metacognitive awareness can be improved by explicit training? 2. Whether students'EFL reading performance can be improved by reading metacognition training? In this part, strategies of direct instructions and modeling by think-aloud method were used by the author to improve students'EFL reading metacognition.The thesis is organized into 3 chapters. Chapter One is the theoretical basis of the present study. It includes the theory of reading and metacognition; especially two components of metacognition: metacognitive knowledge (awareness) and self-regulation. Chapter Two provides the literature review of some related empirical studies on metacognitive knowledge as well as the training of metacognitive strategies. Chapter Three describes the significance of the present study and the research questions. In addition, it outlines the methods used for the study and describes the participants, instruments, training procedures and materials; data collection and analysis; the results. Then the conclusion part summaries the major findings related to the research questions and classroom implications for English reading teaching. At the same time, the limitations of the present study were also discussed in this part.The major findings of the present study are:1. Students'metacognitive knowledge about their English reading is relatively low.2. The enlargement of students'metacognitive knowledge is a useful and scientific way in improving students'reading competence.3. Students'metacognitive awareness as well as their ability of self-regulation can be improved by explicit training.Like any other similar attempts, there must be too much room left to be satisfied in the present study. The author will maintain a major locus of EFL reading research in Chinese context.