A Study Of Correlation Between L1/EFL Reading Metacognitive Strategies And EFL Reading Comprehension For High School Students

With the increasing maturity of metacognitive strategies studies in EFL reading, there have been various studies concerning the relationship between EFL metacognitive strategies and EFL reading comprehension. Since there is a certain relationship between L1 and EFL reading, it is hypothesized that there is a relationship between L1 and EFL reading metacognitive strategies, and that they both have impacts on EFL reading proficiency. If statistics proves them to be true, the study can further discover the positive transfer of L1 metacognitive strategies in EFL reading comprehension for high-school students in China. As a result, this study aims at discovering a new path for learners to improve their EFL reading comprehension from the perspective of metacognitive strategies for teachers to develop reading metacognitive strategies instruction.39 students of Senior Two in Shanghai No. 60 Senior High School were invited to participate into an empirical investigation. Learners were required to complete two English reading test papers and fill out two questionnaires on L1 and EFL metacognitive strategies in reading. Then, the scores of each student in the two reading proficiency tests and questionnaires were processed through SPSS file. The results show the validity and reliability of two questionnaires. After that, the relationship between L1, EFL metacognitive strategies in reading and EFL reading competency are clearly discovered.The conclusions from statistical analysis turn out as follows: First, the influence of gender need not be taken into consideration, which results into further discussion of the research questions. Second, EFL reading metacognitive strategies are better than L1 reading metacognitive strategies for high school students. Third,from the angles of each variable, planning strategies and evaluation strategies are the least used as metacognitive strategies by learners in both L1 / EFL reading. Compared with the selection strategies, learners prefer to adopt the monitoring strategies in L1 reading while they would like to take a better advantage of monitoring strategies than selection strategies in EFL reading.Second, metacognitive strategies in L1 reading set the basis for the adoption of EFL metacognitive strategies in EFL reading except from one of the variable:planning strategies. In other words, students with a good command of L1 metacognitive selection; monitoring and evaluation strategies are likely to have excellent sense of L2 metacognitive reading strategies in terms of the same items.Other kinds of L1 metacognitive strategies have more or less relation with EFL metacognitive strategies variables. Besides, evaluation strategies lay a solid foundation on L1 metacognitive strategies in all variables.Third, EFL reading metacognitive strategies do have an impact on EFL reading proficiency while the impact of L1 reading metacognitive strategies does not reach statistical significance. However, since L1 and EFL reading metacognitive strategies are correlated and the latter influences EFL reading proficiency in a significant way, it can be inferred that L1 reading metacognitive strategies does have an indirect impact on EFL reading proficiency.Finally, practical suggestions are put forward to real English class in senior high school. As for learners, these advices aim at improving their automatic learning ability and EFL reading comprehension by cultivating EFL metacognitive strategies.As for high school English teachers, guidance is given for them to help students to transfer L1 metacognitive strategies in the process of training EFL reading metacognitive strategies, which in turn contributes to the improvement of EFL reading proficiency.