An Experimental Study Of Metacognitive Strategy Training In High School English Writing Instruction

Since the later1970’s, a gradual but marked shift from teaching methods to learningstrategies has taken place in the field of language acquisition research. Language learningstrategy and its instruction has turned into a hotspot issue of foreign language teaching. Andamong all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy has a pivotal role which fills aunique niche in the self-regulatory phylum that enables individuals to coordinate their ownlearning process. Recent years more and more foreign language researchers have recognizedthe positive roles of metacognitive strategy instruction on second language learning. However,limited empirical research has been conducted to investigate the relationship betweenmetacognitive strategy training and second language writing learning, especially in highschool.Therefore, the author of this case study from the perspective of blending training intoclassroom carries out the targeted English writing metacognitive strategy training. AQuestionnaire is administered by the author to investigate the metacognitive awareness andknowledge of the50students, who comes from Grade One in No.1Middle School in Chaling,Hunan Province, as the experiment subjects. The survey result shows that they seldom usemetacognitive strategies, especially planning and evaluating strategies. At the same time, awriting test will be also given among them. After that, the author begins to carry out the18-week writing training. At the end of this training, the same questionnaire and apost-writing test are distributed to students to examine the subjects’ employment ofmetacognitive strategies in writing learning．Data collected from the research is analyzed bySPSS13.0. Qualitative research method like survey report is also used to explore learner’sEnglish writing learning autonomy variation.This research puts the metacognitive strategy training into a topic writing practicing,focusing on solving the following three questions: How to carry out the metacognitivestrategy training in high school English writing instruction? Will the metacognitive strategytraining contribute to strengthen students’ metacognitive awareness? Will the metacognitive strategy training contribute to improve students’ writing performance? The training processincludes:(1) Imparting metacognitive knowledge so as to improve students’ metacognitiveawareness;(2) Making a writing plan before writing;(3) Directing students to self-monitoringwhile writing;(4) Self-evaluating, peer-evaluating and teacher-evaluating after writing.Data analysis shows that:(1) The experiment carries out the training through focusing onthe three steps: before, during and after writing, which promotes to enhance students’metacognitive awareness, and improve their writing proficiency;(2) among the high, medium,and low level writers, low level ones get the most benefits from the training, especially inusing planning strategies. The study believes that integrating appropriate metacognitivestrategy training into writing teaching can strengthen students’ metacognitive awareness andimprove their writing proficiency, and has certain positive effect on promoting learners’autonomy independence.