The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Writing Teaching In Senior Schools

The Senior School English Syllabus of our country has been emphasizing theteaching aims of strengthening students’basic knowledge and developing their skillsof listening, speaking, reading and writing．It is evident that in English teaching andlearning, among the four skills,“writing”is always regarded as the hard nut to crack.For English writing represents the comprehensive ability of the language , and theimprovement of English writing is in fact a process from quantitative change toqualitative change. Thus cultivating students’writing ability is one of the mostimportant tasks of current English teaching. However, in the current senior schoolEnglish teaching, writing teaching remains weak and deficient. Although manyscholars and English educators have been exploring how to improve students’Englishwriting ability, the traditional writing teaching researches still pay more attention tothe writing result rather than the process, still emphasize the teacher’s center rolerather than the student’s role. Since the 1980s, with the establishment ofstudent-centered concept of English teaching, the focus of English teaching has beenshifted from“how to teach”to“how to learn”, then the research focus of Englisheducation has turned to probing into how to arouse students’interest and enthusiasmin English learning and guide students to take part in the whole writing process andlearn self-study. Therefore, it is necessary and essential to make an investigation intothe current situation of English writing teaching, discuss how to combine the trainingof metacognitive strategy with English writing teaching, cultivate students’metacognitive consciousness, and improve students’automatic learning ability andEnglish writing ability.The key to teaching students how to study lies in the acquisition and application oflearningstrategies. As the learning strategies acquisition is listed as one of the teachingobjectives in the newly-issued Senior Middle School English Curriculum Standards(2003), the importance of learning strategies becomes more and more prominent. Among diverse strategies, meta-cognitive strategy is regarded as a higher-level one,which refers to applying meta-cognitive knowledge consciously to plan, monitor,manage and evaluate the learning task. Actually, the control strategy demonstrated inthe newly-issued Senior Middle School English Curriculum Standards (2003) refers tothe meta-cognitive strategy. Only when students are competent to plan, monitor andself-regulate their whole learning processes can they become initiative and successfullearners. Thus the correct application of meta-cognitive strategies is bound to promoteEnglish writing of senior students, and contribute to improving their English writingin limited time.Ten English teachers and eighty students in Senior Three in Hanting No.1 MiddleSchool, Shandong Province are chosen as the subjects of the present research. Theauthor has investigated and made research on the current situation of English writingteaching with the methods of questionnaire and interviews. The data collected areanalyzed by SPSS 13.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). By means of survey,through detailed analysis and discussion, the main findings of the research can besummarized as the follows.⑴The teachers have guided the students to build upproper English writing beliefs but most students haven’t turned the beliefs intopractice. The students still tend to memorize some sample essays.﹙2﹚The students’diverse strategies acquisition mainly relies on their teachers’instruction. However,most teachers haven’t realized the importance of meta-cognitive strategies. Even ifsome have realized the importance, they fail to apply them to their routine teaching.Most students fail to plan, manage and monitor their English writing effectively dueto lack of meta-cognitive strategies, which contributes to the time-consuming and loweffective English writing and hinders their effective employment of cognitivestrategies. Hence, it is high time to systematically train the students by integratingmeta-cognitive strategies.On the basis of investigations and researches and based on O’Malley& Chamot’smeta-cognitive strategies theory, this research intends to explore how to integratemeta-cognitive strategies training into English writing teaching in senior schools, aswell as put forward practical training models. The experimental class was instructed and mainly trained through 4 steps, namely: preparation, presentation, practice andevaluation, while the controlled group was only trained with certain cognitivestrategies of English writing strategies. Through the ten-week meta-cognitivestrategies cultivation, the results of the experimental group students have beenimproved greatly.Through investigation and analysis, this research holds that the consciousmeta-cognitive strategies training in English writing teaching in senior school hasstrengthened students’metacognitive consciousness and urged students to use morewriting strategies. The conscious metacognitive strategy training can enhancestudents’self-control ability and develop their self-management. The writing teachingguided by the metacognitive theory can increase students’interest and confidence inEnglish writing and has a prominent impact on the improvement of writing abilities. .Besides, the writing teaching guided by metacognitive theory has improved students’English proficiency. The findings of this research can provide positive reference forEnglish teachers of senior schools. The understanding of the current situation ofsenior students’English writing and the general characteristics of strategy applicationin English writing is helpful for writing teaching. Probing into how to effectivelyintergrate metacognitive strategy training into English writing teaching in seniorschools can not only improve English writing teaching but also help students studyautomatically, thereby enable students to truly become the masters of their ownlearning.