The Study On Senior Two Students’ Use Ofmeta-cognitive Strategies In English Reading

Reading can provide learners with the most important language input. Furthermore, reading is the main way of learning English. Reading is the core of senior English teaching. It has been a widespread concern of majorities of scholars and teachers on how they can give guidance to students to use the reading strategies effectively and improve students’ reading ability. In the past 30 years, the concepts of meta-cognition and meta-cognitive strategies have attracted the attention of scholars, which give a new angle to investigate reading comprehension. Meta-cognitive strategies are the strategies the learners employ to plan, monitor the process of learning and evaluate their learning effect. If the students can use meta-cognitive strategies in the course of reading actively, they are likely to become more skillful in using these strategies for planning, monitoring and evaluation of their reading process.Although the research of meta-cognitive strategy is fruitful in our country, the studies related to the practice of basic education is far from perfect. As a consequence, more relevant studies are needed. This thesis tries to investigate how frequently the senior two students use meta-cognitive strategies in reading comprehension. It adopts the questionnaire to investigate how the meta-cognitive strategies are used by 243 students from Zhangzhou Zhengxing School. SPSS 17.0 is used to analyze the data. In the meantime, the interviews of teachers and students are combined to detail and further analyze the similarities and differences between senior two students’ use of meta-cognitive strategies in English reading.As is indicated by the result, senior two students have used some meta-cognitive strategies in the English reading. What students sometimes use are selective attention strategy and monitoring strategy, while planning strategy and evaluation strategy are comparatively rarely used. Besides, there are significant differences between boys and girls in using meta-cognitive strategy. Girl students use planning strategy, the selective attention strategy, monitoring strategy and evaluation strategy more frequently than boy students. Compared with low scoring group, high scoring group used meta-cognitive strategy in English reading more frequently. Selective attention strategy and monitoring strategy are the most frequently used strategies. Finally, according to the results of investigation, this paper provides some pedagogical implications and suggestions for teachers with the hope that teachers can cultivate students’ meta-cognitive awareness, motivate students to monitor and reflect their reading process consciously in reading class. The author hopes the results can be of some help to the English teaching of reading in high school by providing relevant reference data for the further research and development of meta-cognition.