The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Writing Teaching In Middle Schools

This thesis is an experimental study of the application of metacognitive strategies to English writing teaching in middle schools.The concept of metacognition was first proposed in 1970 s by Flavell,the American psychologist.Flavell believes that metacognition is the cognition of cognition,which is about the process,the product of personal cognition and all the related activities.According to the view of O’Malley and Chamot(1990),metacognitive strategies are regarded as the higher-order executive skills in all learning strategies,which have the important value in guiding effective language learning.That is to say,students who can use metacognitive strategies flexibly are able to study independently.Writing plays an important role in people’s communication,especially in some specific communication environments.So it is very important for teachers to help students improve their writing abilities.In English teaching,the cultivation of students’ English writing abilities is still one of the important tasks in middle schools.Students’ English writing ability is a very important standard to judge their learning level and learning efficiency.In the current English teaching situation,writing is one of the most difficult teaching parts.On the one hand,compared with listening,speaking and reading,teachers have not paid enough attention to English writing teaching.On the other hand,most students still learn English in a traditional way.They think that the ultimate goal of English learning is to pass the examinations.As a result,students usually spend most of their time in studying vocabulary,sentence structures and grammar points.And they often ignore some writing skills and strategies.According to this situation,improving students’ English writing abilities has become an urgent task in English teaching.However,systematic and in-depth researches of the application of metacognitivestrategies in English writing for middle school students are still insufficient.So the author decided to give students metacognitive strategy training in English writing and tried to explore what effects it has on students’ English writing abilities.This study is going to find out the answers of three main research questions: 1.What is the current situation of metacognitive strategies use among middle school students,specifically reflects in what aspects? 2.What changes have taken place to students’ metacognitive awareness after the metacognitive strategy training? 3.What effects does the metacognitive strategy training have on students’ writing scores?In this study,two classes from grade nine of the second middle school in Guanchang Town,Xinxiang City took part in this experiment for one semester.The literature analysis method,comparative analysis approach and questionnaire survey were adopted in this study.Before the experiment,the author gave students in EC and CC a pre-questionnaire to check out their using situation of metacognitive strategies.To ensure the reliability and validity of the experiment,there was a pre-writing test in the experimental class and the control class.From the independent samples T-test,the Sig.(2-tailed)value is 0.672,which is much higher than 0.05.Therefore,there was no significant difference between the experimental class and the control class.The experiment could be conducted in these two classes.After that,the author gave students the metacognitive strategy training in the experimental class.Students in the control class still had writing classes in a traditional way.After a semester,the author gave a post-questionnaire to students in the experimental class and a post-writing test to students in both classes.The collected data were analyzed by software SPSS 20.0.The results showed that: 1.The middle school students seldom used metacognitive strategies in their English writing.It specifically included several aspects: firstly,students seldom made suitable writing plans and writing goals for their writing.Secondly,in writing process,they didn’t use any writingstrategies to finish the writing tasks.Thirdly,they had no consciousness to assess their writing scores after writing.2.Through a semester’ metacognitive strategy training in EC,students’ metacognitive awareness had been greatly improved.The results of the questionnaires showed that more and more students could use some writing strategies to guide their writing process.They could make English writing plans and set writing goals consciously.Also they monitored their writing process better.What’s more,their abilities of self-evaluating had been improved correspondingly.3.The results indicated that compared with the pre-test,the average score increased by 0.69 in the experimental class,the average score increased by 0.03 in the control class.From the independent samples T-test in post-test,the Sig.(2-tailed)value was 0.044,which was lower than 0.05.So there was a significant difference between EC and CC in the post-writing test.Compared with CC,students in EC made greater progress.From this experiment,it proves that metacognitive strategies could guide middle school students’ English writing.So teachers and students should work together to learn metacognitive strategies so that students can use these strategies to help improve their writing skills.