An Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Writing In Senior High School

Writing plays an important role in English learning.New English Curriculum Standards for high school make a demand on students that they should develop appropriate learning strategies in English learning.Students are required to consciously and constantly adjust their learning strategies according to different learning tasks.While in today’s English teaching,there still exist many problems,especially in writing teaching.The research about how to combine learning strategy to writing teaching is relatively limited.Based on solid theories,the major concern of this study is to figure out how to apply metccognitive strategy training into English writing instruction and improve students’ writing ability.Through introducing metacognition knowledge,metacognitive strategy and its significance in English learning,this paper presents a metacognitive strategy-based training to English writing in senior high school.The purpose of this research is to improve students’ metacognitive awareness and lead students to apply metacognitive strategy into English writing actively by the training of planning strategy,monitoring strategy,evaluating and regulation strategy.Two classes in senior one from Gan Xian Middle School participated in the study,which were composed of 80 students with 40 in the experimental class and the other 40 students in the control class.The experimental class received a metacognitive strategy-based training in English writing,while the control class still received scheduled writing syllabus.Through collecting data from two writing tests,questionnaires and interviews,the paper tries to answer these questions: 1.Whether metacognitive strategy-based training can improve senior high school students’ writing ability;2.Whether metacognitive strategy-based training can strengthen the senior high school students’ metacognitive awareness.The findings of the research indicate that senior high school students’ writing ability can be improved through metacognitive strategy-based training.The training of metacognitive strategy has contributes to students’ metacognitive awareness.So we can come to a conclusion that the training mode which combines metacognitive strategy to writing instruction has great effects on increasing senior high school students metacognitive awareness,optimizing their learning methods and improving their writing results.So the training of writing based on metacognitive strategy has more advantages over traditional writing instruction.The findings have pedagogical implications for English writing instruction.