A Study On The Application Of Meta-cognitive Strategy In English Reading Teaching In Senior High School

Reading ability is one of the core skills that senior high school English teaching emphasizes.Reading is one of the key ways for learners to acquire knowledge and information.Therefore,in the four basic skills listening,speaking,reading and writing,reading occupies an important place,which is highlighted in various exams.Take National Matriculation English Test for example,reading almost occupies the half of the whole exam.For this reason,both teachers and students attach great importance to training reading.Usually,students spend much time doing reading exercises.Afterwards,teachers also spare a lot of time making a detailed account of the reading material.However,the result of the training is unsatisfactory.Reading is still one of the weak parts in learning and teaching.The author made an investigation into the teaching of reading in her own school and found that low efficiency is a general problem.Teachers pay much attention to presenting the language points and grammar items,neglecting training learning strategies and reading skills.Students are required to do a large number of reading passages without considering whether the reading passages are suitable for them.As a result,the students are only able to understand passages which are presented by teachers.When there appear various topics and large vocabulary,they still can't make sense of what they are reading.Thus,in order to improve students' reading skill,the teachers should pay much attention to training the students' reading strategies,helping them strengthen reading awareness and mastering the effective approaches.Meta-cognitive strategy is a typical learning strategy,including planning strategy,monitoring strategy and evaluating strategy.It refers to the strategy during which the learners can effectively monitor and adjust their cognitive process and consequence.Besides,it controls how the information is arranged,monitors and directs how the cognitive process goes,which can plan and monitor different kinds of learning activities.In this study,the author applies the meta-cognitive strategies into English reading and trains the students' meta-cognitive strategies.Meanwhile,it makes an attempt to explore how meta-cognitive strategy training affects the students' reading ability.Two questions will be answered in this study.First,what is the present situation of meta-cognitive strategies used by students in senior high school? Second,what kinds of effects do meta-cognitive strategies training have on students' reading in senior high school?The objects of the study are 100 students from Feng Feng Chun Hua Middle School and the study lasts 16 weeks.The measuring instruments are the questionnaire about meta-cognitive strategy,reading material test and the interview.SPSS 21.0 is used to conduct the data and analyze the result.The result shows that meta-cognitive strategy training can improve the students' meta-cognitive awareness,and they can actively and consciously use meta-cognitive strategies to practice reading.Most importantly,meta-cognitive strategies training help students make much progress in their reading.After the training,the experimental group has much higher marks than the control group.So,it is necessary for the teachers to combine meta-cognitive strategies and English reading.The first step is to make a reading plan,then to monitor the reading process and last to evaluate the reading proficiency,all of which make up an effective learning strategy to improve reading ability.