A Study Of The Application Of Metacognitive Strategy To English Reading In Senior High School

As is known to all, reading is the main way for students to learn English andunderstand the western culture. Reading is also the focus of high school Englishteaching and learning. Even the “Senior High School English Syllable” and “EnglishCurriculum Standard” pointed out that the purpose of senior high school Englishteaching focuses on training students’ ability of reading comprehension. Therefore,reading comprehension is the most basic skill, and the level of it is one of the importantmeasures to assess the students’ language proficiency. A successful reader should notonly have a good command of the language, but also have to use a variety of readingstrategies successfully and efficiently. Recently, the use of metacognitive strategieswhich can improve the level of the reader’s reading achievement has become one of thehottest study topics in English reading.At first，the thesis reviewed some previous theories and studies on metacognitivestrategy and the related studies of metacognitive strategy in reading comprehension andthen introduced some related theories about metacognitive strategy. Upon these theframe of the research was formed. Then the author delivered the questionnaire on theapplication of metacognitive strategies to210students in a key senior high school inChongqing to investigate the current situation of the application of metacognitivestrategies in English reading in senior high school. And then the author use SPSS16.0to analyze and compare metacognitive strategies in some variables, such as gender, age,class, likes or dislikes of English and so on, and analyzed and compared the differencesof reading score in the variables. Later the author used SPSS16.0to analyze thecorrelations between metacognitive strategies and the variables, after that analyzecorrelations between metacognitive strategies and reading score.The following conclusions have been drawn by analysis: First, the senior highstudents use metacognitive strategies in English reading just sometimes. Theirmetacognitive strategies should be improved. The students relatively prefer to use thestrategy of self-management, followed by the strategy of selective attention, the strategyof monitoring, the strategy of planning, and the strategy of self-evaluating is the least favored. Second, the top classes have relatively better metacognitive strategy level thanthe middle classes. Third, the more the students like English, the better metacognitivestrategies level they have. What’s more, the better English achievement is, the bettermetacognitive strategy level they have. Finally, the higher metacognitive strategy levelis, the better English reading score gets.Then the author interviewed some students and teacher to find out the factorswhich are related to the current situation of the application of metacognitive strategy.According to the results of the survey and interview, the author provided someimplications and suggestions for high school teachers and students, hoping that they canpay more attention to metacognitive strategies to improve students’ metacognitiveawareness, to enhance students’ metacognitive strategy use, to help them applymetacognitive strategies in reading, so as to improve the level of reading.