The Impact Of Metacognitive Strategy On English Learner Autonomy

In recent years, metacognitive strategies as advanced strategies in all the learningstrategies have received more and more attentions from scholars at home nowadays. Itsimportant function in language learning has been affirmed by educationist. Relatedresearch shows that language learners with good comprehension of metacognitveknowledge can always work out study plans according to their goals, consciouslymonitor and evaluate their whole learning process. In addition, they always adjust andmodify their study goals and plans as well as learning strategies applied in learningprocess when necessary. Thus, there is a close relationship between metacognitivestrategy employment and learner autonomy.Since the concepts about metacognition and metacognitive strategy wereintroduced into applied linguistics, the related researches at home on how to fosterlearner autonomy through training learners‘awareness of metacognitvie strategies havebecome the one of hottest topics in Chinese Education Field, which, however, havemerely focused on state-owned universities. There are fewer the related researches inprivate college. At present, private university has become an important component ofChina‘s higher education. Moreover, its population is increasing in China. Majority inprivate colleges have no choice but to enroll in private college after failure in thenational college entrance examination. Thus, their English level and achievement ofEnglish proficiency are also relatively lower, which brings many difficulties in Englishlearning. Metacognitive strategy employment and learner autonomy of private collegestudents are of greater concern nowadays.The present research is an empirical study on correlation between Metacognitivestrategy training and learner autonomy. Both quantitative analysis and qualitativeanalysis approaches have been applied to analyze the data collected from researchinstruments including questionnaires, language proficiency tests, learner profiles andinterviews in order to have a comprehensive understanding of research objects. Thepresent study was designed as quasi-experiment with taking two intact classes offreshmen majoring accounting in private college as subjects. One is experimental class,the other is control class. Experimental class has received metacognitive strategytraining for an academic year. The5-point Likert scale was used for the questionnairesdesigned for metacognitive strategy and learner autonomy in present study. The study used independent sample T test and paired sample T test to analyze the statisticalresults obtained from questionnaires investigation before and after experiment bymeans of SPSS in order to verify the effectiveness of metacognitive strategytraining on fostering students’ learner autonomy by analyzing whether the values ofpre-and post-questionnaires changed or not. The scores of tests conducted inrespectively experimental class and control class before and after experiment weretaken as pre-test data and post-test data. In the same way, these data were analyzed toverify the positive effect of metacognitive strategy training on learner ‘s languageproficiency. The study gives a qualitative description of changes of subjects‘metacognitive strategy employment and learner autonomy before and after experimentby observing the minutes of interviews and tracing learner profiles.The research results show that metacognitive strategy training advanced students‘confidence, provoked their interest in English learning and enhanced their awarenessof strategy employment, which made them more autonomous in English learning.Therefore, metacognitive strategy training is effective in improving learner autonomyand English proficiency.45...