An Empirical Study On Meta-cognitive Reading Strategies Of Non- English Major Students

Among the five language skills(listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating), reading takes up a crucial role. What’s more, it is one of the approaches for EFL learners to learn target language. However, many college students still can’t effectively and fluently read relevant English articles even though they have learned English for several years. There are some reading problems for them, such as slow reading speed, failure to fully understand the texts because of their insufficient vocabulary and grammar knowledge, unable to guess the meaning of new words and passages according to the context. One of the major underlying reasons is that they are lack of meta-cognitive strategies. Meta-cognition was first mentioned by Flavell in 1976. From then on, scholars abroad and home have made quite a number of researches on it. Meta-cognitive strategies are at a higher level of learning strategies, and are of significant importance in helping learners’ learning.The study is based on O’Malley & Chamot’s classifications of the meta-cognitive strategies and the author has done an empirical study with the participants from Chongqing University of Education. The following questions are mainly researched in this thesis. 1) What’s the overall level of meta-cognitive strategies in English reading used by students in Chongqing University of Education? 2) What’s the relationship between meta-cognitive strategy ability and reading achievements? 3) Can meta-cognitive strategies be trained to improve reading achievements? The author chooses one of the classes as the experiment class, but the other one is the control class. Students in the experiment class are given meta-cognitive strategies training for ten weeks, and the training content is divided into three phases: planning, monitoring and evaluating strategy. The author investigates participants’ meta-cognitive strategy and reading comprehension level by using questionnaires and reading comprehension texts before and after the meta-cognitive strategies training. And all the collected data are analyzed by the software of Statistical Package for Social Science 20.0(SPSS 20.0).The thesis has the following findings: all the participants’ meta-cognitive strategy level is at a medium level. But after the training, students’ meta-cognitive strategy has been evidently improved in the experiment class. Pearson correlation coefficient analysis indicates that it is positive correlation between meta-cognitive strategies and reading performances. In the aspect of reading comprehension tests, their post-test scores are higher than that in pre-test. For the students in the control class, however, their meta-cognitive strategies and English reading comprehension performances are without any significant differences. Therefore, conclusion can be summarized that there are improvements in both meta-cognitive strategies and reading proficiency for students majoring in drug analysis and detection class1 in Chongqing University of Education after the training. Moreover, the meta-cognitive strategies training in reading is feasible, effective and necessary as well.