An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On Senior High School Students' English Writing

As one of the indispensable parts in English learning, English writing is the significant manifestation of comprehensive English abilities. However, many students don't know how to improve their English writing ability effectively. Vann and Abraham(1990) found that unsuccessful learners don't lack specific cognitive strategies and skills, but they don't know when to choose which kind of strategies under what circumstances. In traditional writing teaching model, teachers tend to overemphasize the importance of linguistic knowledge while ignoring the cultivation of students' writing ability.Accordingly, this paper attempted to combine metacognitive strategy training with English writing based on the theoretical framework of the metacognitive theory and the humanist learning theory in order to arouse students' writing interest and enhance their writing ability.This research took two paralleled classes in the senior middle school as subjects taught by the author(one as experimental class, the other as control class). The experiment lasted 18 weeks including pre-questionnaire, pretest, writing teaching,post-test and post-questionnaire. Two research questions are: 1) Can metacognitive strategy training enhance senior middle school students' English writing ability? 2) Is metacognitive strategy training helpful to increase senior middle school students' interest in English writing?The analysis of the results showed that metacognitive strategy training could improve students' English writing effectively, especially for the writing content and the writing accuracy, and worked well in raising students' interest in English writing.However, it must be pointed out that though this teaching approach can give English writing teaching implications, the results achieved need further studies.