Application Of Metacognitive Strategy To English Reading Teaching In Rural Junior High School

Reading is one of the most important parts in foreign language learning, so how to improve students’ English reading proficiency has been the focus for both researchers and English teachers. Rural junior school students have great difficulty in English reading with the following characteristics: unwillingness to read, lack of plan, lack of self-reflection and so on. Based on the theories of learning strategies, constructivism, information processing theory and the research on the relationship between metacognitive strategy and English reading at home and abroad, the author makes a study to improve students’ reading proficiency through metacognitive strategy training. First, the author investigates students’ use of metacognitive strategy to English reading in rural junior high school before and after strategy training by questionnaires. And then the author studies whether metocognitive strategy training in English reading teaching can improve rural junior high school students’ reading proficiency.This study lasts 12 weeks with 44 students of the Grade 9 from the rural second school in GuangHe as the subjects. Two questionnaires are used to investigate students’ use of strategies before and after the strategy training. Besides, two reading proficiency tests are used to investigate their reading proficiency before and after the training. Strategy training is conducted from the following aspects: presenting, teacher’s modeling use of strategies,scaffolding, evaluating and expanding. Finally, the author uses Excel, SPSS statistical analysis system to analyze the data.The statistical analysis indicates that students seldom use metacognitive strategy in English reading before strategy training(m=2.5784). However, students can frequently use metacognitive strategy in English reading after strategy training(m=3.7280). And their reading proficiency is greatly improved(P=.025<0.05) too, which proves application of metacognitive strategy to English reading teaching in rural junior high school can definitely improve students’ reading proficiency. At last, the author discusses the implication and the limitation of this study according to the results.