A Study On The Application Of Metacognitive Strategy To Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

Vocabulary is one of the primary components of language learning. To be specific, English vocabulary has a great influence on learners’ listening, speaking, reading and writing. If one could not be equipped with adequate vocabulary, no matter how good his or her grammar is or no matter how excellent his or her pronunciation is, communication will not go well.How could a language learner study vocabulary effectively? During the past decades, a lot of researchers made many studies focusing on vocabulary learning strategies. And some linguists have pointed out that among all the governable factors, vocabulary learning strategies impacts greatly on English vocabulary learning. However, many of them mainly focused on cognitive strategy but ignored metacognitive strategy. As time went by, scholars abroad and at home stated that among all the strategies, metacognitive strategy are the most effective learning strategies. Metacognitive strategy refers to applying planning, monitoring and evaluating to regulate learning process. Once learners have enough metacognitive awareness, they can make plans of learning a language, select appropriate learning strategies, monitor the learning process and evaluate study results. Then they can become independent, autonomous and high-efficiency learners. The author conduct some researches and find that most subjects of the relevant studies are college students or vocational-technical school students and few studies are concerned with senior middle school students, so the author decide to use senior high school students as subjects in order to get new findings. Through this study, the author aims to help the senior high school students grasp more vocabulary learning strategies according to their own characteristics and improve their vocabulary learning ability as soon as possible. Based on the above reasons, this study carry out a study to explore whether metacognitive strategy have positive effects on senior high school students’ English vocabulary learning or not.In this study, the author apply metacognitive strategy to teach vocabulary in class. The teacher guide how to plan, monitor and evaluate their vocabulary learning. The author choose two classes of Grade Two from No. 25 Senior High School in Kai Feng, 103 students in total, to participate this experiment. One class is selected as controlled class(CC) and the other as experimental class(EC). In EC, students are asked to join in metacognitve strategy training while the CC students do not take part in this training. Before this experiment, the author make a metacognitive strategy questionnaire and pre-tests in two classes in order to investigate the status of using metacognitive strategy and current situation of vocabulary size. And after the experiment is finished, post-tests on vocabulary in two classes are done. When this experiment is completed, the data are analyzed and discussed in detail with SPSS17.0.This research prove that the EC students made obvious progress in vocabulary post-tests, and they could gradually apply metacognitive strategy to daily vocabulary learning. However, the CC do not show remarkable performance in the post-tests. Hence the application of metacognitive strategy play a important role in students’ vocabulary learning.After the research, the author make a conclusion about findings, pedagogical implications, limitations of this research and put forward suggestions for further study.