A Study Of Metacognitive Strategies And The Cultivation Of Junior Middle School Students’ Ability Of Autonomous Learning

The new curriculum reform requires the teachers to develop the students’ learningstrategies and improve their abilities of learning autonomy. Therefore, to help languagelearners develop autonomy in langugage learning emerges as a pedagogical goal of languagelearning and teaching.As one of the learning strategies,metacognitive strategy is regarded as a higher-orderexecutive skill.The efficiency of using language strategies is decided by whether learners cansucceed in using metacognitive strategies----the higher-order executive skill or not.Metacognitive strategy is a key factor in developing learning autonomy.If having higherawareness of using metacognitive strategies,students are able to make proper learninggoals,to plan, to monitor his learning process or to evaluate the effectiveness of his study.The author thinks that metacognitive strategy training contributes a lot to developing students’abilities of learning autonomy.The research setting for the study consists of80students of Junior Three in the No.2Experiental School of Jinan High-tech Development,one of which is the experimentalclass,while the other one the controlled class. The metacognitive strategy training on thestudents lasts for18weeks.Before the training,the author did a survey about the students’ learning autonomy,andthen made a training plan, which includes self-planning,self-monitoring as well asself-evaluation. After18weeks’ training, by comparing the results of the two classes,we candraw a conclusion that the metacognitive strategy training can enhance the students’ abilitiesof learning autonomy and it can also improve the students’ English achievements.