A Study On The Effect Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Junior School Students’ English Vocabulary Acquisition

Pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar are the three elements of language andvocabulary is the basic one. So, the key to successful language learning is to learnvocabulary well and grasp as many words as one can. In the past forty years, a lot ofstudies have been carried on to research the nature of English teaching, which have a greatinfluence on the teaching method as well as learning strategy in English vocabulary. Thedevelopment of the concept of metacognitive strategy provides a new angle to studyEnglish vocabulary learning as metacognitive strategies can improve students’consciousness of self-planning, self-monitoring, self-evaluation as well as facilitating theiractive learning.The introductory section of the thesis makes an analysis of the present Englishvocabulary teaching in China, and introduces the purpose and significance, the researchquestions as well as the layout of the study. Chapter Two displays the basic theory ofmetacognitive strategy, strategy training and the current researches of metacognitivestrategy training. Chapter Three mainly introduces the research process including theexperiment instruments, subjects, steps and contents of the experiment; then, the surveydata are analyzed and discussed to prove the feasibility and the necessity of metacognitivestrategy training in the junior middle school English vocabulary teaching; and an interviewis conducted on some of the students from the experimental class. Chapter four providesthe results and discussion of the experiment, which consists of the data collection andanalysis of the questionnaire, result and analysis of the experiment, summary of theinterview. Chapter Five offers the results as well as the discussion of the experiment; somereasonable suggestions of metacognitive strategies traning in the process of vocabularyteaching are also proposed.The main purposes of the study are as follows: first, to get to know the currentsituation that vocabulary metacognitive strategy applied by junior school students; second,to test whether the use of metacognitive strategy in their English vocabulary can promotetheir English vocabulary learning; third, to propose some suggestions about reasonableapplication of metacognitive strategies in vocabulary teaching in junior high school.The subjects are123junior school students of two natural classes—class two andclass three of Grade one in Lushan Experimental School. One class is randomly chosen asthe control class and the other as the experimental class. The research data are from theirscores in the pre-test, post-test and the questionnaire. The experiment lasted for10weeks. First, the author delivers a questionnaire on the use of metacognitive strategies to thesestudents and the data are collected and analyzed based on the questionnaire. According tothe result of the questionnaire, the overall average score is less than3points, whichindicates that the students can’t widely and regularly use metacognitive strategy in theirEnglish vocabulary learning process. Monitoring strategy gets the lowest score, whichindicates that junior middle school students can not effectively monitor their own learning,can not select appropriate strategies to learn efficiently, and can’t regulate their learningstrategies timely and properly. Selective attention gets a relatively high score, which showsthat most students can distinguish the important words from the less important ones. Then,an experiment of vocabulary metacognitive strategy training is conducted among thesestudents. After the experiment, an interview is conducted among some students from theexperimental class. The results show that the training had improved students’ vocabularylearning as well as their interests in English. The results of the pre-test and the post-testsuggest that explicit metacognitive strategy training does have a positive effect on juniorstudents’ vocabulary learning. Finally, some suggestions are proposed to junior high schoolteachers that they should pay more attention to students’ metacognitive awareness and helpthem apply metacognitive strategies in their English learning process to be autonomouslearners.