Study On Gender Differences In Senior High School Students' English Reading Metacognitive Strategy

Reading is a main way for learners to get language input. As Chinese students lack the social environment of foreign language acquisition, language input is dependent on classroom teaching and extracurricular reading. Therefore, reading teaching has always been important.In the process of English teaching, teachers should not only teach students basic language knowledge, but also train students to use correct language learning strategies, in order to make their learning more efficient. Metacognitive strategy is one of the learning strategies;metacognitive strategy refers to learners use the strategy of planning, managing, monitoring and evaluating. The use of metacognitive strategy is affected by age, gender, learning proficiency and so on. The thesis aims to study senior high school students' English reading metacognitive strategy utilization from the perspective of gender difference.An empirical study on sixty-five students in Grade Three in Anda Senior High School was conducted with questionnaire, reading comprehension test and interview. Based on the classification of metacognitive strategy given by O'Malley & Chamot and Oxford, the research uses the software SPSS (23.0) to analyze the gender differences in English reading metacognitive strategy. The results indicate that there are significant differences between male students and female students. Males got higher scores than females on planning; females got higher scores than males on self-monitoring, while males and females performed equally on self-management, selective attention and self-evaluation. According to the gender differences on English reading metacognitive strategy, some suggestions are offered on the basis of empirical study, aiming to help teachers optimize the classroom teaching and students improve reading ability.