A Study Of The Effects On EFL Reading Proficiency For Junior Middle School Students In China-A Perspective Of Metacognitive Regulation Training

As one of the most basic language skills, reading has become a new indispensable important way to acquire knowledge and information of science and technology. How to improve the reading level of the students has been one of the focal points of foreign language teaching. Metacognitive self-regulation is a strategy as well as an effective way which is used to guide and help the readers to adjust and control the reading process in terms of the psychology, so as to cultivate the students'reading ability. This paper is an empirical study about the relationship between metacognitive self-regulation training and English reading among junior middle school students. Having known the reading comprehension ability and the use of the metacognitive self-regulation of the students, The teachers adopt some training methods which are based on strategies for foreign language teaching, then teach the students and make them master the the strategy of metacognitive self-regulation, revealing the relationship between metacognitive self-regulation strategies and English reading learning. All is to provide important basis and enlightenment for the research on English reading comprehension for the junior middle school students; the training of metacognitive self-regulation and EFL teaching.The subjects involved in the study were 120 students from Grade Two in Zhaotong Experimental Middle School. Having known their reading comprehension ability and the use of the metacognitive self-regulation by using the questionnaire, the target group received reading instruction by using the metacognitive self-regulation training method for 10 weeks. The result of the training is as the following:1). Although reading instruction with reciprocal teaching brought some positive effects to the target group on their test performance, the difference was not statistically significant enough. But there is quite difference in the use of some metacognitive self-regulation strategies.2). The analysis of the scores of some typical comprehension questions found that the target group got significant higher mark than the controlled group, the strategies included guessing word meanings from the context and scanning for specific information. This finding shows that reading instruction with reciprocal teaching really enhances students' awareness of reading strategy employment and the use of some strategies has become automatic in solving comprehension problems.Because of the complexity of using strategy and the process of reading, it is so hard to avoid some deficiency in terms of concept, methods and some other aspect, these findings in this thesis still need to be verified in the future research.