A Survey On The Use Of Meta-cognitive Strategies In High School English Reading

For foreign language learners, reading has always been of great importance, so how to improve students’ reading skill has always been the focus of researchers. The birth of meta-cognitive theories has created a new angle for the associated researches. Reading is a process of gaining knowledge, with the readers applying what they have already known to predict, experience and confirm.,which is a complex mental process. During this process, readers, to successfully achieve their reading goals and solve the problems they have encountered in the reading activity, have to employ some effective reading strategies. Therefore, the training of meta-cognitive strategies is essential for achieving a successful reading activity.This research is based on the meta-cognitive theories, with the students in Panzhihua NO.7 High School as the researching samples. The students were divided into four groups by their English reading proficiency. Their use of the four categories was surveyed through a questionnaire and a couple of well-designed questions. This survey is done by means of questionnaire and interviews. The data base is analyzed with SPSS. On the basis of this, the following three conclusions are drawn:1, the general level of high school students’ use of meta-cognitive strategies in their reading is not very high; 2, the evaluating strategy is least used by the high school students in their English reading; 3, there are obvious differences between the four groups’ use of meta-cognitive strategies in their English reading. At the end of this paper, some suggestions are offered for the teachers to train the their use of meta-cognitive strategies in their normal reading teaching.