An Empirical Study Of Meta-cognitive Strategy Training In Senior One Students' English Vocabulary Learning

Both teachers and students find it challenging to teach and learn English vocabulary.Many a student suffers lack of initiative,enthusiasm,independent thinking and self-reflection when it comes to vocabulary learning.Under such circumstances,it is necessary that teachers should guide and teach Senior One students to master a series of scientific and systematic vocabulary learning strategies as early as possible.The development of meta-cognition and meta-cognitive strategies offers a brand-new perspective to investigate English vocabulary teaching and learning.This study is aimed at involving meta-cognitive strategy training in Senior One students' English vocabulary learning and proving the validity of the training on the empirical ground.Equipped with meta-cognitive strategies,students are able to draft plausible plans,select appropriate vocabulary cognitive strategies,monitor the learning process and evaluate their learning performance so that they can finally cultivate the awareness of involving strategies in study,develop the habit of learning independently.More importantly,as independent,autonomous and efficient learners,they are well prepared for the challenges ahead.Among all the related studies from home and abroad,a majority of them focus on the correlation between meta-cognitive strategies and the achievements of English skills or overall English level,others about applying meta-cognitive strategy training to improving students' English reading ability,but few about combining meta-cognitive strategy training with English vocabulary teaching and learning.Such a situation proves the theoretical and realistic significance of this study.There are two research questions in this study:(1)What are the changes in the application of meta-cognitive strategies after Senior One students receive the training?(2)Does meta-cognitive strategy training affect Senior One students' English vocabulary proficiency? If yes,what are the different effects on Senior One students with varied proficiency levels?In order to conduct the research,an experiment is designed and the subjects are two parallel classes in Senior One taught by the author.The meta-cognitive strategy training is involved in English vocabulary teaching and learning in the experimental class while the control class do not receive any meta-cognitive strategy training.The instruments are two questionnaires and two vocabulary tests.Two questionnaires are done by the experimental class before and after the experiment respectively.A pre-test and a post-test are organized in both experimental and control classes.The relevant data collected from the questionnaires and the vocabulary tests are then analyzed by using SPSS18.0 statistical software.After the experiment,significant improvement in the employment of meta-cognitive strategies and students' vocabulary proficiency has been found in the experimental class.The major findings of the study are summarized as follows:Firstly,compared with the data from the first questionnaire,the frequency of Senior One students' using meta-cognitive strategies in English vocabulary learning is raised from a medium level to a high level.Among all the four types of meta-cognitive strategies,the changes in using the strategies of planning and evaluating are relatively more prominent.Secondly,meta-cognitive strategy training can significantly improve Senior One students' vocabulary proficiency.It is also found that students in the experimental class with medium scores and low scores in the pre-test make greater progress.The analysis shows meta-cognitive strategy training can effectively improve the vocabulary proficiency levels of students with medium and low scores.The findings of this study have proved the effectiveness and practicability of involving meta-cognitive strategy training in English vocabulary teaching and learning and the positive effects of meta-cognitive strategy training on students' vocabulary proficiency.Thereby,teachers are supposed to attach great importance to cultivating students' awareness of meta-cognition and the use of meta-cognitive strategies by combining training with teaching so as to make students' vocabulary learning more active,effective and efficient.