The Effect Of Metacognitive Strategy Training On English Writing Among Senior High School Students

The basic task of English learning is that learners should master four basic skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing expertly.Among the four skills,reading and listening are regarded as comprehensive skills,while speaking and writing are accounted as expressive skills.Writing,as a form of output skill,to a large extent,reflects students' comprehensive language ability,which plays an important role in English learning but receives less attention of research.Despite the significance of English writing,problems do exist in writing class among senior school students.In the current English writing teaching in China,English teachers usually focus more on the form and structure of language but pay less attention to the process of how students write and how to manage the habit of writing.Specifically,in traditional writing teaching class,senior high school English teachers seldom teach strategies of English writing and hardly apply strategy-based teaching methods in their teaching behaviors.However,previous studies have suggested that meta-cognitive strategy,which includes planning strategies,selective strategies,monitoring strategies and evaluation strategies etc,which are significantly related to English learning,particularly in writing.Therefore,the current study aims to find out firstly how meta-cognitive strategy is used among learners and secondly to examine whether meta-cognitive strategies are beneficial in improving English writing ability among English learners.What's more,which aspects of meta-cognitive strategy significantly predict learners' English writing will also be investigated.The research questions are raised as follows:(1)What is the general situation of the use of meta-cognitive strategies in English writing among senior high school students?(2)Does meta-cognitive strategy training improve learners' English writing?(3)Which aspects of meta-cognitive strategy significantly predict learners' English writing?In order to solve the three problems raised above,a 16-week experiment was carried out in the Nanchang No.10 senior high school in Jiangxi province.Two parallel classes(matched on meta-cognitive strategy and on writing scores),Class 9 and Class10 were compared.Class 9 was the experimental class which adopted the meta-cognitive strategies training,while class 10 was the control class which received the traditional English writing teaching.Before the experiment,the two classes took a pre-test by completing a questionnaire measuring meta-cognitive strategy.After the experiment,a post-test was taken again respectively for each class to measure meta-cognitive strategy and English writing ability.Furthermore,semi-structured interview was adopted to find out students' use of strategies and whether training has effect.All the data results were analyzed by SPSS24.0 software.The results showed that:(1)The use of students' meta-cognitive strategies was at a moderate level.The planning and evaluation strategies were at low level,which indicates that few students had long-term orshort-term plans in English writing.Moreover,most of the students' English writing evaluation was still the traditional teacher-oriented model.In addition,among all the metacognitive strategies,students used selective strategies and monitoring strategies more frequently than planning strategies and evaluating strategies.(2)After a semester of meta-cognitive strategy training,the experiment class improved significantly not only in their use of meta-cognitive strategy but also in their English writing performance,whereas the control class showed no improvement,which suggests that meta-cognitive strategy training has a positive effect on the use of strategies and the performance of English writing.(3)Among the four aspects of meta-cognitive strategy,only selective strategies significantly predict the students' English writing performance.Based on the result that the meta-cognitive strategy had a positive effect on English writing,the paper discusses some implications that the senior high school English teachers should apply the meta-cognitive strategy in English teaching.