A Study On The Application Of Metacognitive Strategy To English Writing Teaching In Senior High Schools

In the foreign language teaching, the duty of the teacher is to direct the students to beindependent, autonomous and efficient learners, so cultivating the autonomous learningabilities of the students seems very crucial. It means that the students need to masterlearning strategies which are essential for their learning process. Among all the learningstrategies, the metacognitive strategy is the most effective one. While as for the senior highschool students in China, English writing is a kind of important language skill in theirEnglish learning process. But unhappily, English writing is often the weakest point forthem. As a result, one of the key issues is how to improve the English writing proficiencyof senior high school students.Since it was put forward in the1970s by Flavell who is an American psychologist, theterm “metacognition” has been paid more attention to by the researchers and scholars. Themetacognition theory is made up of two parts, that is, metacognitive knowledge andmetacognitive strategy. And the latter is the central issue of this study. In the past20years,the researchers and scholars abroad and at home carried out more and more researches onthe metacognitive strategy. While with the comparison of the other learning strategies, thestudies in this field are still in deficiency. As a result, the thesis aims at studying theinfluence of metacognitive strategy training on the English writing teaching, anddiscussing the feasibility and effectiveness of applying the metacognitive strategy toEnglish writing teaching in senior high schools.According to O’Malley&Chamot, the metacognive strategy is classified into threeparts, that is, planning strategy, monitoring strategy and evaluating strategy. Based on thisclassification, the researcher designs a set of English writing teaching plan combined withmetacognitve strategy training. And the study aims to answer two research questions asfollows. The first question is if metacognitive strategy writing teaching can enhancestudents’ metacognitive strategy awareness. The second question is if metacognitivestrategy writing teaching can improve students’ English writing achievement.Research subjects are95students from two parallel classes in Panjin Senior Highschool. There are47students in the experimental class (EC) and48in the control class(CC). The study lasts for12weeks, and the control class is given traditional writingteaching while the experimental class is taught by the model of metacognitive strategytraining in writing teaching. The analysis of the data from questionnaire presents that themean scores of EC before and after the training are2.4897and3.5574respectively, which shows that metacognitive strategy awareness of students in EC is enhanced a lot, namely,the students become more conscious in planning, monitoring and evaluating their writing.The results and analysis of pre-post writing tests in EC shows that the mean scores are16.8298and18.5745respectively, which proves that the model of metacognitive strategytraining in writing teaching can significantly improve the students’ English writingachievements. However，for CC, the mean scores are16.25and17.08respectively. And asa result, it cannot be denied that students in CC do make progress to a certain degree intheir writing performance under the traditional writing teaching.The experimental result of this study is meaningful to the present writing teaching,especially to the English writing teaching in senior high schools, both in theory and inpractice. Moreover, the researcher also points out the limitations of this study and givessome suggestions for the further study.It is expected that this study can provide some feasible reference for English writingteaching in senior high schools so as to improve students’ writing achievements effectively.