The Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition In College English Learning

In china, vocabulary learning of college students is mainly based on traditional classroom teaching. The monotonous mode, the dull content and the limited teaching time make students learn English with low efficiency. The vocabulary size of college students cannot reach the level in College English Curriculum Requirements(abbreviated as Requirements). Thus, how to enlarge students’ vocabulary is becoming an urgent problem. Incidental vocabulary acquisition(IVA)is one of the methods of vocabulary acquisition, referring to acquiring vocabulary indirectly through other learning activities, such as reading English, watching movies and listening to music. As a complement of classroom teaching, IVA is studied by more and more researchers to extend a helping hand to teachers and students.Metacognitve strategies can manage and guide all kinds of learning activities,cultivating learner autonomy. Based on the previous studies, this study chooses experiment as the leading role, integrates metacognitve strategy training into the study of IVA under movie context, and discusses whether the training would improve students’ IVA ability, aiming to provide some enlightenment to enlarge students’ vocabulary size. This thesis matches several movie captions with the vocabulary in Requirements, and finally selects Princess Diary as the research material to conduct the case study and experiment. The specific research questions are listed as follows:1. Does the metacognitive strategy training improve students’ ability of IVA under movie watching context?2. Does the training change students’ attitude towards IVA?3. Is it possible to make use of metacognitive strategies with various learningresources to acquire words, making incidental acquisition an effective means to enlarge students’ vocabulary size?The author selects two classes, i.e. 80 freshmen majoring computer science from Shenyang Normal University as the research subjects, and divides them into experimental class(EC) and control class(CC). The experiment is conducted on intensive reading class and listening class, from March, 2015 to June, 2015, which is twelve weeks. First, the author carries on pre-questionnaire and pre-test in EC and CC to investigate students’ present situation of metacognitive strategies and IVA. Next, the author integrates metacognitive strategy training into regular intensive reading course in EC, and CC remains regular teaching as comparison.Finally, the author conducts post-questionnaire and post-test in EC and CC. After the experiment, 5 students were randomly selected from EC for an interview.The thesis indicates that: 1. The metacognitive strategy training improves students’ ability of IVA and enlarge the vocabulary size they acquire incidentally under movie watching context; 2. The strategy training changes students’ attitude and beliefs towards IVA, converting their vocabulary learning belief; 3. Students are willing to accept metacognitive strategy training, helping themselves to enlarge vocabulary size from various recourses.