Application Of Metacognitive Strategy To Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High Schools

The key point of New Curriculum Reform for senior high school students is to help them learn independently and become autonomous and effective learners in English learning. It also sounds true for English vocabulary teaching. In other words, students need to master some learning strategies which are required in autonomous learning, especially metacognitive strategy. There also exists inseparable relationship between application of metacognitive strategy, students’ metacognitive awareness, metacognitive experience and ability of self-learning. Moreover, vocabulary is one of the greatest obstacles for senior high school students in China, since the students in this period need to master a considerable amount of words in mere three years while the vocabulary need to be learned during this period is not only huge in quantity, but also irregular in patterns. Therefore, it is necessary to exploit metacognitive strategy to English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools, which can give a new perspective for English vocabulary teaching and learning as well.In order to verify the effect of metacognitive strategy in vocabulary teaching in senior high schools, some research questions will be discussed as follows in this paper: firstly,whether application of metacognitive strategy to vocabulary teaching can improve students’using frequency of it; secondly, whether it can raise students’ metacognitive awareness and experience as well as self-learning ability; thirdly, whether it can improve students’ vocabulary achievements more effectively.99 students from two parallel classes taught by the same teacher, the author, are chosen as the research subjects from Zhiyuan Senior High School. And the research instruments covers questionnaire, experiment and interview. Before the experiment, a questionnaire on metacognitive strategy in vocabulary learning and vocabulary pre-test are conducted in experimental class (EC) and control class (CC). During the experiment, students in EC are taught with metacognitive strategy in vocabulary teaching, while those in CC are taught with traditional vocabulary teaching methods as usual. Meanwhile, in the middle and later stages of the experiment, two interviews are carried out in EC respectively. After the experiment, the questionnaire with the same contents of the first one and vocabulary post-test are given in EC and CC. Finally, with the collected data and analysis of questionnaire and tests in EC and CC ,and interviews made in EC, the results are as follows.(1) The frequency and awareness of using metacognitive strategy can be increased by applying metacognitive strategy to vocabulary teaching.(2) Students’ metacognitive awareness and experience, interest and ability of self-learning can be aroused as well after the training of metacognitive strategy.(3) Application of metacognitive strategy to vocabulary teaching enables students to study vocabulary more effectively and to increase their vocabulary achievements and quality to some degree.Therefore, it is effective and feasible to apply metacognitive strategy to English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools. However, this research has its own limitations by reason of the limited time, small sample size and other aspects, but it can still provide a reference for most English teachers to improve their vocabulary teaching.