Fostering Metacognitive Strategies In Teaching English Reading To Senior High Students

Reading comprehension occupies a central place in basic language skills, which has a great influence on learners'global English level. For this reason, it has long been a common concern on how to enhance the level of reading proficiency. An increasing number of researchers come to realize that those learners who perform poorly are not lacking in any specific strategy at all. The key to their failure lies in the fact that it is difficult for them to assign right time and place to put proper strategies into practice. The use of metacognition involves using metacognitive knowledge consciously, performing plans, monitoring and evaluating learning process. As is known, reading is a psycholinguistic activity where the learners need to actively combine their knowledge with the textual information in the process of planning, recognizing, monitoring and evaluating. During this process, strategies involved play an important role. Only when the readers are able to intentionally regulate and control the learning as well as adopt appropriate strategies can they deal with reading problems more efficiently.Based on metacognition theory, the present study is to investigate the application of metacognitive strategies in senior English reading, confirm the possibility of fostering metacognitive strategies in teaching reading and try to find out the significance of metacognitive strategies.52 senior students were chosen as subjects and metacognitive strategies training was introduced in regular English reading class. The data were collected through questionnaires, tests, and interviews which were processed with SPSS 17.0 so as to study the relationship of learners'metacognitive strategy level and their reading competence. Conclusions are drawn as follows:1. Metacognitive strategies are not frequently used by senior students 2. The competence of Metacognitive strategies can be improved by training in English class 3. Fostering metacognitive strategies can lead to the enhancement of students'reading performance. It is suggested that teachers should be equipped with the knowledge of metocognitive strategies together with training abilities. Meanwhile, it is a good idea to carry out the fostering of strategies in English regular class.