A Study On The Application Of Metacognitive Theory In The Teaching Of College English Writing

College English Curriculum Requirements states briefly that in college the aim of English learning is to develop students’ability to use English in their future work and social communication to exchange information effectively in both oral and written English to suit the need of social development and international communication. Therefore, it is clearly that English writing is an especially important part of College English teaching. However, in the process of English writing teaching, most teachers and students have trouble in it. Though many scholars and English educators have been exploring how to promote students’English writing ability, the performance of students has still not been improved significantly. Therefore, how to improve students’English writing level has become one of the major problems in the research of English writing.Metacognition is an important conception which was first put forward by famous America linguist Flavell in1976. He pointed out that metacognition means someone’s knowledge relating to one’s own cognitive processes and products or anything concerning them. And metacognitive strategy is regarded as a higher level of strategy, which refers to the methods and steps for successful learners to learn a foreign language. And it also means applying metacognitive knowledge to plan, monitor and evaluate their writing task. So a great number of researches have been carried out at home and abroad by researchers to study the relationship between metacognition and Second Language Acquisition and more and more scholars have realized the importance of metacognitive strategies and English writing, but generally speaking the empirical study is still lack. So this study mainly explores the relationship between metacognitive strategies and English writing.This paper will discuss around three questions:1) What about the general situation of college students (referring to English majors in this paper) using metacognitive writing strategies in their English writing?2) Whether metacognitive strategies training can influence students’overall English writing proficiency?3) What’s the influence of metacognitive strategies training to students’English writing proficiency? To answer the above questions, this paper investigates127students majoring in English from Tai Yuan University of Science and Technology. First, the author conducted a metacognitive strategies questionnaire in127students, and then experimental class would be trained on the basis of metacognitive strategies during16weeks. The data collected from experiment were analyzed by descriptive statistics, T-test and Paired sample test to analyze whether the proficiency of control class and experimental class were improved after training. And at last, the researcher will interview all the students face to face. The result shows that metacognitive strategies not only improve the students’ability of English writing but also raise their awareness of using metacognitive strategies in writing.At last, from the research we can see that metacognitive strategies play a significant and essential role in English teaching and have a positive effect on English writing. And the average score of students’English writing proficiency was improved three points after metacognitive strategies training. Therefore, the teacher should strengthen metacognitive strategies training in English teaching to improve students’ writing proficiency.