High School English Reading, Cognitive Development And Culture Study

From the 1970s, 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 at the same time, metacognition theory has been exploring and studying various kinds of the cognitive activities of human beings, in which reading activities are certainly included. And in the present teaching environment calling for quality education, to cultivate students' reading strategies and skills, and to develop their effective reading abilities are the important aims of a highly effective English teaching. But the problem we are faced with is that most of the metacognitive theories we can at present study are often expounding their views from the aspect 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 second language, is such that students usually study English only by reading and writing without the real English environment, which inevitably causes afar-from-effective result. So this essay tries to investigate and solve problems like what kind of measures teachers should take, how to teach students the metacognitive strategies in students' reading practice, and how to develop students' reading potentials. And at the same time when students are reading English materials, how do they comprehend the material?What kind of problems and what difficulties do they have? What kinds of measures should be taken to improve their reading level? In this essay, some explorations are made by researching the problems above.About 188 students were investigated and trained for two months, of whom 72 students are in grade two, and 116 students in grade one, using such researching tools as metacognitive strategy index(MSI), the NMET English reading comprehension texts of recent years, open questionnaires, the teaching plans of metacognitive strategies and the metacogintive strategy self-analysis form. The results are as below:1. In English reading, the Chinese high school students use very few reading methods and are at a rather low metacognitive level.2. 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.3. To truly improve students' metacognitive level in English reading, it is not enough only to teach the metacognitive strategies in classes. Teachers should also encourage students to do a lot of reading after classes, 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.4. To improve students' reading comprehension abilities, the elementary knowledge teaching is still necessary, such as phonetics, vocabulary, sentence patterns, grammar, background knowledge and so on.