Experimental Research On Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To Vocabulary Learning For Junior High School Students

The present study attempts to find a new efficient way for the English vocabulary teachingin order to improve the junior middle school students’ English vocabulary proficiency, andmeanwhile to develop their autonomous learning ability. The author has conducted anexperimental research on application of metacognitive strategies to junior middle schoolstudents’ English vocabulary learning. The study mainly deals with the following tworesearch questions:(1) Can the training of metacognitive strategies improve the students’vocabulary proficiency?(2) Can the training of metacognitive strategies increase theawareness of students’ use of self-monitoring strategy?In the study, the author chose two parallel classes in which there are35students ofHeyuan City. The experimental group receives a10-week training of metacognitive strategiesincluding self-planning, self-monitoring and self-evaluation. The author has conducted apre-test and a post-test for both classes. Then all the data are collected and analyzed by theSPSS software and the analytic methods are Independent Sample T-test and Paired SampleT-test. Next, the author adopted checklist and learning logs to monitor and measure students’using of metacognitive strategies. The purpose of doing so is to monitor and instruct studentsto use metacognitive strategies to improve their English vocabulary learning result. Inaddition, the students use the monitoring form for planning and the monitoring form for usingstrategies to monitor and evaluate by themselves, the other members of the group can alsohelp supervise and check. After the experiment, the author also conducted an individualinterview with9students from the experimental group.From the analyses of the data collected, the author gains some significant findings:1． The application of metacognitive strategies improves the students’ vocabularyproficiency greatly.2． The training of metacognitive strategies strengthens students’ awareness ofself-monitoring strategies.3．The training of metacognitive strategies enhances students’ autonomous learningability.