A Study Of Proficiency In College Students’ Reading From The Perspective Of Meta-cognitive Theory

Reading is a complex psychological process concerning the reading subject’scognition, understanding, absorption and application to the reading material. It is oneof the most important ways and means for people’s study. Strategy is the skills,methods or deliberate behavior that students adopt to help their learning or recall theinformation about the language and the content. Reading strategy refers to a thinkingprocess that the reader consciously chooses to use to complete the reading task. Howto improve the students’ reading ability and reading level is always a hot topic for theconcern of scientific and teaching research. Educators have long been exploring themost effective way to teach college English reading. However, the practice showsthere is not any teaching method most effective. The traditional English teachingmethods treat teachers as the center and ignore students’ awareness of autonomouslearning, which is a vital factor to improve reading skills. In recent years, with thedeepening of the English reading research, people begin to emphasize the status androles of learners in the process of English learning. And the focus shifts to how tomotivate the student’s active role in the study. While meta-cognitive strategy plays avital role in the fostering and training of students’ initiative.In the1970s, American psychologist Flavell proposed the concept ofmeta-cognition.According to the theory of O’Malley and Chamot in1990, comparedwith cognitive strategies and social strategies, meta-cognitive strategies occupy ahigher position and play a vital role in promoting learner to develop initiativeaspect.(Graham,1997) If students do not know some meta-cognitive knowledge,it isdifficult for them to have their own learning direction, evaluate the progress and theachievements they make or determine their future direction.(O’Malley et al,1985)This paper consults a large number of research results on meta-cognition andreading from home and abroad and it explores students’ English reading ability frommeta-cognitive angle. The main purpose of this paper is to explore the role ofmeta-cognition in students’ English reading. Meta-cognitive strategies mean, in theprocess of learning, people use meta-cognitive knowledge to have a reasonable planning, arrangement, monitoring, regulating and evaluating of learning task, someta-cognitive strategy occupies a higher position in learning strategies.This paper uses the methods of theoretical analysis and experiments to study, anduse some concrete methods, such as questionnaires(before and after),strategyinstruction,reading test (before and after) to conduct. In this study,the researchsubjects are non-English majors freshman from a university of ChangchunCity,there are two classes of60students which last a semester.in other words, it lasts18weeks of teaching experiments.The two classes were randomly divided intoexperimental class(n=30)and control classes (30), the experimental class acceptedstrategy instruction based on meta-cognitive knowledge while the control class acceptthe traditional teaching. The experiment was divided into three phases: the first phase,the author conducts questionnaire and pre-reading text to experiment class andcontrol class, so the author can know the basic condition of the students and secondlanguage reading level and problems in reading before the experiment. The secondphase, strategy instruction is showed respectively to experiment class and controlclass. The last phase, we conduct post–text and questionnaire after the experiment intwo classes and obtained the data and conclusionThe study focuses on the two issues:(1) How to train reading skills of non-English major college students’ withmeta-cognitive strategy?(2)What is the relationship between students’ meta-cognitive ability and readingability?Through18weeks’ teaching experiments, the data obtained shows that thestudents’ overall meta-cognitive level is low, so teachers need to train the students’meta-cognitive ability and meta-cognitive strategies can increase students’ learningability and reading ability; pre-and post reading text show that reading scores of theexperiment group and control group have improved respectively but the experimentalgroup is more remarkable.Therefore, this paper intends to start from the questionnaire to understand thelevel of students’ meta-cognitive strategy and improve students’ English reading level. In this study, there is certain practical significance for the current English teaching. Byrising students’ reading meta-cognitive level, it allows them to constantly monitor andadjust their reading process and then enhance their second language reading level. Inaddition, through the training of students’ meta-cognitive knowledge, their learningefficiency can be improved and therefore they are capable of becoming better learners...