A Study On The Application Of Metacognitive Strategy Instruction In The English Writing Teaching In Senior High School

Since the later 1970’s, a gradual but marked shift from teaching methods to learning strategies has taken place in the field of language acquisition research. Language learning strategy and its instruction has turned into a hots pot issue of foreign language teaching. And among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy has a pivotal role which enables individuals to coordinate their own learning process and involves an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning process. Recent years more and more foreign language researchers have recognized the positive roles of metacognitive strategy instruction on second language learning. However, limited empirical research has been conducted to investigate the relationship between metacognitive strategy training and second language writing learning, especially in high school.The research aims at working on the problem of how to integrate metacognitive strategy training into English writing teaching in senior high school and how to enhance students’ writing proficiency through the metacognitive strategy training. This research mainly uses the experimental method, supplemented by questionnaire survey and the interview method to carry out the research. The study was conducted with the participation of 54 students in an experimental group, and 46 students in control group from an ordinary high school in XuanHua county, Zhangjiakou city, Hebei Province. An eighteen-weeks metacognitive training package was incorporated into the English writing program of the experimental group. The research focuses on answering the following three questions: What is the effective way of carrying out the metacognitive strategy training in high school English writing teaching? Will the metacognitive strategy training contribute to strengthen students’ metacognitive awareness? Will the metacognitive strategy training contribute to improve students’ writing level? The training process includes: imparting metacognitive knowledge so as to improve students’ metacognitive awareness; making a writing plan before writing tasks; directing students to self-monitoring while writing and self-evaluating, peer-evaluation and teacher-evaluation after writing.The experiment carries out the training through focusing on the three steps: before, during and after writing. The experimental results obtained from pre-tests and post-tests, questionnaire and interview during and after the training show that students’ metacognitive awareness can be raised through metacognitive strategy training in writing class instruction. Trough the systematic training, they can apply the strategies consciously and autonomously to their writing practice. Moreover, the training does contribute to the improvement of students’ writing level. The writing score of the experimental group is significantly better than that of the control group after training. All in all, the training has enhanced the learners’ awareness in metacognitive strategy use, which, in turn, has improved their English writing level to a considerable degree. Therefore, it is urgent and significant for teachers to integrate metacognitive strategy training with writing class instruction to help students enhance their writing level.