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An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Training Metacognitive Strategies On English Writing In Senior High School

Posted on:2012-10-12Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X R SunFull Text:PDF
GTID:2217330335976183Subject:Subject teaching
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English writing is always regarded as the important component of English teaching. And the level of English writing can directly reflect the learners' comprehensive ability of using language. But English writing is still an obstacle for the majority of Senior High students, and is a concerned problem for most educators.This study is based on the Theory of Metacognition from Flavell and the classification of metacognitive strategies from O'Malley and Chamot. It is carried out to find out the relationship between metacognitive strategies and English writing. In fact, there were quite a few studies before. Through these studies, most educators ensure the positive influence of metacognitive strategies on English learning. However, the studies about the improvement of English writing are limited. The aim of this study is to find out an effective method of improving students' writing ability. So this empirical study chose 85 Senior High students as subjects who are in No.3 middle school in Dalian, Liaoning province.This study tried to answer the following questions:1. How about the overall levels of Senior High students' using metacognitive strategies? 2. Is there any difference between successful learners and non-successful learners in using metacognitive strategies? 3. Is there any relationship between metacognitive strategies and English writing ability?In order to find the answers to these questions, this study included two questionnaires in pretest and posttest, and two writing tests in pretest and posttest. And then the collected data would be analyzed by SPSS 17.0. The data was input into SPSS and undertook descriptive statistics, independent sample T-test, and paired samples T-test. All of these analysis concluded that the level of using metacognitive strategies is not high in Senior High School and they cannot use the four metacogntive strategies in the balanced way, especially when comparing the successful learners with non-successful ones, there is obvious difference between them. Through the special training in the experimental group, which is not only in writing strategies and but also in metacognitive strategies, it is easy to find the level of using metacognitive strategies have been improved greatly, and the marks of English writing made great progress. For those non-successful learners, the progress was more remarkable.Through this study, we can find metacognitve strategies play an important part in English writing. Although students'knowledge of metacognition is limited and the awareness of metacognitive strategies is weak, they can be made up for by special trainings. Meanwhile, using metacognitive strategies has an important effect on the overall levels of English learning. All of them provide valued suggestions for the following English teaching in Senior High school. In addition, the emphasis of this study is metacognitve strategies, so it ignored other factors which can affect the proficiency of English writing. That is to say, this study has its own restrictions, and more improvement should be taken into consideration in it.
Keywords/Search Tags:metacognition, metacognitive strategies, English writing, metacognitive strategies training
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