The Roles Of Metacognitive Awareness On Senior High School Students' Academic Achievement

Studies on the metacognitive theory have been increasingly drawn the researchers' attention in the education teaching fields,however,few researchers focus on the relationship between metacognitive awareness and their academic achievements in English learning in senior high school.Besides,almost all of these papers only analyzed metacognitive theory from some certain aspects,such as listening,reading comprehension or writing.This study aimed to investigate whether the improvement of the levels of metacognitive awareness facilitated senior high school students' academic achievement in English learning and to investigate the role that metacognitive awareness plays in enhancing senior high school students' academic achievement in English learning so as to help the students to promote their English learning.Based on the theories of researchers such as Flavell and Wenden,this study was carried out from three components of metacognitive awareness: knowledge of cognitive subjects;knowledge of cognitive tasks;knowledge of learning strategies.The samples of this study were 36 Senior Grade One students who were divided into three groups according to the results of the first final examination: high scores,medium scores and low scores.Two research questions raised in this paper were discussed and answered through the results of the two final examinations,the two questionnaires and the in-depth interview after the second questionnaire surveyed:1)Does the improvement of the level of metacognitive awareness facilitate senior high school students' academic achievement in English learning? 2)What is the role that metacognitive awareness plays in the enhancement of senior high school students' academic achievement in English learning?The findings indicate that participants' proper learning strategies and higher level of metacognitive awareness do lead to a better academic achievement in the process of English learning and with the level of their metacognitive awareness increasing,the participants' academic achievements tend to increase.Specifically,the level of metacognitive awareness of participants in high score group and low score group has been improved to some extent,and their academic achievement has also been improved accordingly.Participants in medium score group have showed significant improvement in their overall metacognitive awareness level and their academic achievement has been improved significantly,too.Moreover,the results of the research also showed that students' metacognition awareness plays a great role in inhancing their academic achievements: it enables the participants to be more active,more positively evaluate themselves and make them fully aware of the positive effects of positive self-treatment,and fully realize that they can make progress by actively overcoming difficulties;it enables them to better understand that different types of learning tasks require different types of resources,better know how to obtain resources to complete the learning tasks under certain circumstances,and better know how to grasp and judge the difficulty of learning tasks so as to use different learning strategies to successfully complete a task of in the best way;it enables them better know what is the most effective strategies for learning and what is the best way to learn,better know how to use proper strategies to learn most effectively and timely use metacognitive strategies such as planning,monitoring and adjustment to promote English learning.