A Study Of The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To Develop Non-English Majors’ English Reading Habits

As an important communicative tool, English plays a key role in both our life and work, and English reading is very essential in English learning. English reading is the main and most reliable source of language input. Moreover, as for the majority of Chinese students, English reading is the major means by which they get to know the language and foreign culture, due to the lack of language surroundings.However, despite the efforts made by Chinese teachers and experts, so many Chinese students are still poor at coping with English comprehension. When it comes to dealing with a great deal of English reading materials, Chinese non-English majors often find difficult to accomplish the various English reading tasks. Having been learning English for about a decade, they still have difficulty in English reading comprehension, such as the memorization to new words and phrases, the analysis and understanding for difficult and complex sentences, and the structure analysis for the text.With several years of teaching experiences, the author of the paper found that, English reading habits are directly linked to the performance of non-English majors’ reading comprehension. The above problems result from students’bad reading habits, and gradually they plunged into a vicious cycle, which leads to students’low interest and poor performance in English reading. Therefore, it’s rather essential to develop students’ reading habits in college English teaching, in order to promote their English reading interest and performance.As an important learning strategy, metacognitive strategy can help students be aware of and control their learning process, and then take regulatory measures, such as planning, monitoring and evaluating to accomplish their English learning. To develop the awareness of metacognition and metacognitive strategies can help students "learn how to learn", thus be a true dominant role in English study.This paper is to conduct interviews and experimental study on the application of metacognitive strategies to develop non-English majors English reading habits. After the training of developing the experimental class’s English reading habits and seeking the relationship between English reading habits and reading performance, it’s shown that making good use of metacognitive strategies can help non-English majors build up their good habits in English reading, which naturally leads to the great progress and good performance in English reading comprehension. Meanwhile, it offers a possibility to apply metacognitive strategies to developing non-English majors’reading habits and improving their English reading performance.