An Experimental Study On The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Reading Teaching In Senior High Schools

Reading is one of the main ways for learners to acquire knowledge and information.Therefore,in the four basic skills of language learning-listening,speaking,reading and writing,reading comprehension occupies a very important position.The “New Curriculum standards for High School English” also put forward a demand that “to cultivate students' ability to acquire and process information in English” is one ability that the senior high school English teaching focuses on.The best way of learning language is to learn in a language context,but the language learners in China are not in English context.Therefore,how to improve the student's reading comprehension level in Chinese context is always one of the research subjects that English language teaching researchers and practitioners researched on.Unfortunately,although reading comprehension gets more and more attention of the teachers and students,reading is still the weakest link of learning and teaching.The “high input but low output problem” in reading teaching makes a lot of people confused.In the author's opinion,there are many reasons that can lead to such a confusing situation.And one of the most important reasons is that the traditional teaching method only emphasizes the teachers' dominant status but neglects the students' important roles.Teachers always spend most of their time in translating the whole text which lead to the situation that students only understand a text's meaning but don't know the reading method.As a result,they still cannot solve the difficult passage later.According to careful study and experiment,the author find that the using of metacognitive learning strategies is one of the most important factors that affect the effect of students' English reading.Therefore,the author holds the opinion that the training of metacognitive reading strategies to the students is an effective approach to improve students' reading ability.The research is aimed at investigating the effect of metacognitive strategy training on senior high students' English reading ability,so the author wants to answer the following two questions:First,does the training of metacognitive reading strategies have a positive effect on the metacognitive awareness of senior high students?Second,can the training of metacognitive reading strategies improve the reading proficiency of senior high students?The subjects of this experiment are Grade-one students in Renqiu No.1 Senior High School.The author has taken empirical research,questionnaire,and case teaching method.The research lasts for an academic year and the experiment data will be analyzed through SPSS17.0 statistical software.After that,the answers to the questions above can be reached.The result of the research shows that after an academic year of metacognitive strategy training to the student,their metacognitive strategy awareness and reading comprehension skills have both improved.Therefore,it is very necessary to conduct metacognitive strategy training in English reading teaching.It can help the student to plan,monitor,regulate and evaluate their reading effectively and guide them to do independent reading.And more importantly,once the students master the metacognitive strategy,they will become the true master of English learning and benefit for all their life.