Enhancing High School Students’ English Learning Autonomy By Metacognitive Strategy Training

In recent years, the learner-centered teaching view has gain widely attention, and ithas become a primary objective of pedagogy to foster language learners’ autonomous learning ability. A number of educational researchers consider that the goal of education should be to develop students’ learning autonomy and make them become autonomous learners. Besides, Holec (1981) defined autonomy as "the ability to take charge of one’s own learning". Autonomous learning ability is a capacity acquired by specific strategy training, and in this way the ability can be improved continuously. Previous studies mostly pay attention to comprehensive learning strategies, and study whether the strategies have positive influence on language learning proficiency. While students focusing on metacognitive strategy training are not too much. Wenden (1985) considers that learning strategy is the key to foster learners’autonomy while metacognition is the key to learning strategy. The development of the concept of metacognition gives a new perspective to promote students’autonomous reading ability. Reading has an important place in the classroom where language learning is the central purpose, because reading is a highly effective means of extending students’command of language. The paper mainly takes reading as an example to explore the effectiveness of using metacognitive strategy training to improve senior students’autonomous learning ability.The experiment was conducted among55second-year senior students from two classes that the author taught. Class One which has27students is as experimental class, Class Two which has28students is as control class. During the experiment, metacognitive strategy training is undertaken in experimental class, while in control class, students are taught by traditional teaching plan. The experiment lasts about8weeks and students are trained metacognitive strategy mainlyin the aspects of planning, monitoring and evaluation. Instruments used in the paper include test, questionnaires, learner dairies and follow-up interviews. And SPSS is adopted to analyze the data.After the analysis, the following conclusion has been drawn:1. Through metacognitive strategy training, students’language proficiency is improved, especially their reading comprehension ability.2.Students’awareness of metacognitive strategies in reading has been improved and plans, evaluation and monitoring metacognitive ability has also been improved.3. Metacognitive strategy training has positive influence on improving students’grades. At last, according to the results, the author gives teachers some suggestions. They should focus on how to effectively foster students’metacognitive awareness and train their students to learn metacognitive strategies in class so that make students become efficient and autonomous learners.