Relevance Of Non-English Major Tertiary Students’ Meta-cognitive Strategies And English Reading Competence: An Empirical Study

Meta-cognition is a significant branch in the cognitive psychology and educationalpsychology. In fact, it also has been applied to the language teaching, including theteaching of English reading. A large number of researchers pay attention to theapplication of meta-cognitive theory into English teaching practice. What‘s more, itshows that meta-cognitive reading strategy instruction improves readingcomprehension competence to some extent. However, it is likely that there are not somany studies that are researched the Chinese non-English major tertiary students on theinfluence of meta-cognitive reading strategies. In order to deal with the current readingproblems of the tertiary students and improving their poor reading comprehension, it isurgently necessary to apply the relevant meta-cognition theory to instruct and cultivatetheir meta-cognitive reading strategies.The instruction of meta-cognitive reading strategies is not only based on therelevant reading strategy, meta-cognitive theory of reading comprehension but alsointeractive reading model, utilizing meta-cognition as a theoretical foundation and astrategy instruction as one of pedagogical foundations. The author will mainly focuson writing the meta-cognitive reading strategy content, including planning,monitoring, adjusting the reading procedures and evaluating the reading results.During the whole reading procedure, the readers will be gradually influenced by themeta-cognitive strategies and they will try to adopt some of them to solve the readingdifficulties and problems.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first part is the general introduction withthe study purpose, significance and research questions. The second part is theliterature review and theoretical knowledge of meta-cognition, includingmeta-cognitive strategies, meta-cognitive knowledge, and reading theory. In addition,the following parts are research method and the case study, which detailedly analyzeand investigate the present English reading situation by the questionnaire and thestatistics from the pre-test, post-test and the meta-cognitive reading instruction on the tertiary students of Shanghai Normal University. Finally, the conclusion part issummarized the major findings that are related to the thesis research questions andcan prove the meta-cognitive reading strategies are useful and helpful to promoteChinese non-English major tertiary students‘reading competence. Meanwhile, thelimitations and some suggestions of the study are also described and presented in thelast part.In the end, the conclusions of the study are:(1) most of the Chinese non-Englishmajor students in Shanghai Normal University own few meta-cognitive strategiesbefore the meta-cognitive strategy training in the reading process;(2) the Chinesenon-English major students can acquire meta-cognitive strategies by training;(3)meta-cognitive strategies are helpful and practical to improve the Chinese non-Englishmajor tertiary students‘reading competence.Therefore, English teachers should realize meta-cognitive strategies are influentialon non-English major tertiary students‘reading competence and are positive toimprove the English reading comprehension. In addition, English teachers should haveawareness to cultivate students‘meta-cognitive strategies in the reading process.