A Study On The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To Senior High School Students’ English Reading Comprehension

As we all know, reading is one of the four basic skills (listening, speaking,reading and writing) and plays a very important role among them, especially in theteaching and learning of senior high school students. Reading is not only oneimportant channel to gain knowledge and information, but is the major way to learnEnglish as well. However, there is no native language environment in China, so howto effectively improve learners’ English reading abilities and proficiency has alwaysbeen emphasized by a large number of English researchers and teaching practitioners.In the past thirty years, there have many researches on the nature and methods ofEnglish reading, which all greatly influence English teaching and learning. SinceFlavell first put forward the term metacognition, there has been a new perspective tostudy English reading. Gradually, teachers have begun to realize that it is the mostimportant to teach students how to do reading comprehension by themselves,especially for the senior high school students. At present, most key senior highschools have large classes and students vary in English proficiency. Also, students getlow marks in the reading comprehension part in their English exams. Therefore,teachers need to consider how to foster students’ ability to read independently andhelp them become autonomous learners.In light of the relationship between metacognitive strategies and English readingcomprehension, the thesis aims to investigate the overall situation of senior highschool students’ metacognitive strategies use in their English reading comprehension and whether students with high English reading comprehension performances usemetacognitive strategies more often. The author chose206second-year students fromDengta No.1Senior High School as subjects，eighty percent of whom are from ruralareas. By means of questionnaire, reading comprehension test and interview, theauthor made a survey about the overall situation of senior high school students’metacognitive strategies use and keyed all the collected data into a computer toanalyze by SPSS16.0for windows. The results showed that the frequency of students’using metacognitive strategies in their reading process belongs to medium use. That isto say, the subjects in the present study just sometimes employ the metacognitivestrategies in their reading process. Then seeing from the comparison results, studentswith high reading comprehension performances use metacognitive strategies moreoften than those with low reading comprehension performances. The author hopesthat the results of the study can contribute to the future English reading teaching insenior high schools, to help improve senior high school students’ readingcomprehension performances.