Metacognitive Strategy Training In College English Reading Based On The Differences Of Cognitive Styles

English reading is a part in which most non-English major students lose many marks. Many scholars from home and abroad did a large number of researches on the English reading, hoping to find some methods to help the students improve their English readings. The author read a lot of references and materials and found that many scholars studied metacognitive strategy training. At the same time, the author also found that the differences of cognitive styles can influence students in choosing and using metacognitive strategies. Therefore, the author combined metacognitive strategy training with cognitive styles, conducted metacognitive strategy training based on the differences of cognitive styles on the students, hoping to improve the English reading achievements of non-English major students by this training.This study took 80 non-English major students from two classes in Shenyang Normal University as the subjects. The author chose one class as the experimental class and the other class was the control class. The author first carried out Cognitive Style Figures Test in the experimental class and divided the students into the field independence group and field dependence group according to the results. And then these students filled in Metacognitive Strategy Questionnaire simultaneously. According to the analysis of the results, a conclusion was obtained: there were significant differences in choosing and using metacognitive strategies in English reading between field independent students and field dependent students. Then the two classes both had a pretest, and the results showed that there were no significant differences in the reading achievements of the two classes before the experiment. The experimental class was trained with metacognitive strategy training based on the differences of cognitive styles, and the control class with normal metacognitive strategy training. After the training, the two classes both had a posttest. At last the author used Independent-Samples T Test and Paired-Samples T Test to analyze all the data which were collected with SPSS 19.0.Here are some conclusions in this study:1) There are significant differences in using metacognitive strategies in English reading between field independent students and field dependent students.2) Normal metacognitive strategy training and metacognitive strategy training based on the differences of cognitive styles can both improve the students’ English reading achievements.3) Metacognitive strategy training based on the differences of cognitive styles did improve the English reading achievements more obviously than normal metacognitive strategy training.4) Metacognitive strategy training based on the differences of cognitive styles can be introduced into the English reading instruction of non-English majors.Therefore, according to the conclusions in this study, we can know that metacognitive strategy training based on the differences of cognitive styles can be a very effective method to improve the students’ English reading achievements, and the teachers can introduce it into daily English reading instruction of non-English majors. The results of this study have a certain theoretical and practical significance on the English reading instruction of non-English majors and the researches of metacognitive strategy training.