On The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To Improve Oral English Learner Autonomy For Students In Vocational Colleges

With the development of life-long education, fostering learner autonomy hasbecome more and more important in the school education. Researchers have putforward different approaches to develop students’learner autonomy and applyingmetacognitive strategies just belongs to one of the approaches. O’Malley et Chamotregard that metacognitive strategies are higher executive orders over the other twostrategies and it depends on the use of metacognitive strategies to a large degreewhether the learners can succeed in their learning or not. Many researches home andabroad have shown that metacognitive strategies are the key to cultivate learnerautonomy. Some scholars like Ji Kangli, Wang Duqin, Zhang Yanjun based on theirown researches prove that applying metacognitive strategies training can changestudents’belief in language learning, inspire their learning motivation, enhance theirconfidence and improve their learner autonomy. However, the research on therelations between metacognitive strategies and learner autonomy stills stays on thegeneral perspective, the research on the specific language aspect like oral Englishlearning is still quite limited. Therefore the author hopes to explore the research onapplying metacognitive strategies to improve vocational college students’learnerautonomy in oral English learning.Our literature review mainly rotates on theories of metacognition and learnerautonomy. Concerning metacognition, we review the learning strategy related theories,theories of metacognition and empirical studies of metacognitive strategies training.Concerning learner autonomy, the research is extended towards the theories of learnerautonomy, the relations between metacognitive strategy and learner autonomy and thedefinition of learner autonomy in oral English learning. Finally detailed illustrationsare made on how to use metacognitive strategies training to improve students’learnerautonomy in oral English learning.Then I conducted one semester empirical study among the vocational collegestudents. The experiment adopted the method of combining metacognitive strategies training with cognitive strategies, we integrated O’Malley and Chamot’s CALLAtraining model into our experiment, the metacognitive training included four aspects:planning, monitoring, problem-solving and evaluating. We used an experimentalgroup and a controlled group to testify whether metacognitive strategies training canprove the following two hypotheses:1. Metacognitive strategies training can improve students’metacognitiveawareness and metacognitive strategy use in oral English learning;2. Metacognitive strategies training can enhance students’learner autonomy inoral English learning;The data were collected from one metacognition questionnaire, one learnerautonomy questionnaire and two oral English tests before and after the training. Thenwe used SPSS19.0 to compute the statistics from independent-samples T test,paired-samples T test and made detailed analysis of means and standard deviation. Atthe same time, we conducted qualitative analysis towards interview and diaries.The results have proved the two hypotheses that using metacognitive strategiestraining can improve students’metacognitive awareness and the use of theirmetacognitive strategies; using metacognitive strategies training can improvestudents’learner autonomy in oral English learning. Metacognitive strategies traininghelps the students to enrich their metacognitive knowledge, increase students’motivation, the feeling of success and sense of responsibility in oral English learning,enhance students’ability to select and use the proper learning strategies and can bebeneficial to improve the students’level of oral English. Through the training, most ofthe students in the experimental class have successfully acquired their learnerautonomy in oral English learning.