Application Of Metacognitive Strategies In English Reading Of A Junior High School

Metocognitive strategies in reading comprehension refer to planning，monitoringand evaluating students themselves in the reading process. It means that students use aseries of strategies or have mental activities in their mind. English readingcomprehension is an active and interactive process between students and readingmaterial in order to understand the reading content. If students can actively use themetacognitive strategies, they will be able to successfully recognize, promote andrecompose the main idea and meaning of the reading material in order to get betterreading efficiency. Present research into metacognitive strategy application of Englishreading shows that the developing level of learners’ metacognitive strategies isinfluenced by many factors, such as education background, culture background,learning stages, language level, cognitive style and concept about strategy training, etc.Metacognitive strategy training can also improve learners’ consciousness of their ownreading level, language itself and choosing strategies.The present study is mainly about metacognitive strategies and their applicationin English reading of juniors. There has been some research on training collegestudents, senior high school students and junior high school students. So the objects ofpresent study are juniors who are rarely concerned in research into application ofMatacognitive strategies in order to improve their English reading skills. For thispurpose, the research mainly discusses metacognitive strategies and their functions inEnglish reading. The instances can illustrate the possibilities of application ofmetacognitive strategies in English reading in order to explore how we applymetacognitve strategies to English reading of juniors. The purpose of this research isto discuss the following two questions:1.What metacognitive strategies can be used inthe English reading to improve English reading level of juniors?2. How do weapply metacognitive strategies to English reading of juniors?One hundred and twenty juniors in a Changchun middle school wereadministered to complete the survey questionnaires of application of metacognitivestrategies and reading comprehension pre-test. The author got the initial data andstatistics. Then, the author uses metacognitive strategies to train the students of oneclass for four months. Next explain what metacognitive strategies juniors can use inthe English reading and teach them how to apply them to practice. Then analyze the data and the statistics from the questionnaires and the post-test. Compare the results ofthese two classes. At last, the author gets the final conclusion.The conclusions for the research are as following:1. The students have usedsome metacognitive strategies in the English reading. They usually use looking foranswers with the questions, skanning it when meeting something unknown,encouraging themselves when getting unpleasant results etc. But they don’t know theyare using metacognitive strategies. So we should teach them how to apply planningstrategy, regulating strategy, monitoring strategy and evaluating strategy to Englishreading.2.The reading level of juniors in the experimental class is improving after fourmonths’ metacognitive strategy training and practical appliance.3. The changes ofreading level of juniors in the control class are not obvious.