A Study on College Teachers’ and Students’ Metacognition in English Reading

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A Study on College Teachers’ and Students’ Metacognition in English
Reading
1
YANG Xiaoyan
School of Foreign Studies, Henan Polytechnic University, 454003
[email protected]
Abstract: By adopting quantitative and qualitative method, the study, intends to investigate the college
teachers’ and students’ metacognitve knowledge and strategy in English reading. Results of the study
indicated that the level of both the students’ and their teachers’ metacognitve knowledge is very low,
both employ selecting attention category most frequently while the planning and evaluating categories
are the least used strategies. The study aims to enhance teachers’ awareness of metacognition and to
improve the level of students’ metacognitive knowledge and reading abilities.
Keywords: metacognitive strategy, metacognitive knowledge, college teachers and students, English
reading
1 Introduction
Metacognition, which refers to “thinking about thinking”, plays an important and positive role in
learning and its significance has been widely acknowledged in education in general. Metacognition is
the knowledge of one’s cognitive process and monitoring system of one’s cognitive process.
Metacognitive knowledge refers to the part of one’s acquired world knowledge that has to do with
cognitive matters (Flavell, 1979). Three main variables, which are person knowledge, task knowledge
and strategy knowledge, may influence cognitive processes.
Reading is basically a cognitive process which includes many metacognitive activities for the reader
must actively monitor his reading process and solve the problems in appropriate ways. Reading
comprehension, as Anderson (1991) pointed out, is “not simply a matter of knowing what strategy to use,
but the reader must also know how to use it successfully, and to orchestrate its use with other strategies.”
The traditional reading teaching method in China has focused too much attention on teaching language
knowledge, neglecting to activate students’ use of metacognitive strategies, and hence leading to the
lack of autonomous reading abilities in students. As a matter of fact, the Chinese undergraduates of
non-English majors are deficient in knowledge about “how to learn” and their reading abilities turn out
far from being satisfactory (Yang Wenying, 2002).
A lot of studies abroad show that there exists a positive correlation between metacognitve strategy use
and the learners’ reading proficiency (O’Malley et al., 2001; Kletzien, 1991; Pressley, 2000). Moreover,
most domestic studies have focused on the description of the present state of Chinese learners’
metacognitive strategy knowledge (Liu Yichun, 2002; Liu Huijun, 2004). The subjects in the previous
researches on metacognitive strategy are always learners, the state of Chinese teachers’ metacognitive
knowledge which is closely related to the students’ learning has not been explored. Therefore, the
teachers’ metacognitive knowledge is analyzed and compared with that of their students in the present
study. The study intends to find the relationship between the teachers’ and their students’ metacognitive
knowledge, probe into the potential problems and put forward pedagogical suggestions.
，
2 Research Methodology
This paper is the product of the project A Study on College Teachers’ and Students’ Metacognitive Strategy in
English Reading supported by the Humanities & Social Science Foundation of Henan Polytechnic University (Grant
No. R2010-21).
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2.1 Questionnaires
Altogether 151 students and 33 teachers participated in a questionnaire survey. The subjects entailed in
this study came from Henan Polytechnic University. The students were second year students from five
classes majoring in Economic Management, Chemistry, Computer Science and Technology, Civil
Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Information respectively. The subjects selected basically
covered the different disciplines of study in the university, including liberal arts, sciences and
engineering. The teachers were those who were teaching second year non-English majors.146 students
and 32 teachers returned their response to the questionnaire. Therefore, the interpretation and analysis of
the178 valid samples are available.
Two questionnaires were used in the study. They served students and teachers respectively.
The first questionnaire named “Questionnaire of Metacognitive Knowledge (QMK) of English Reading”
was used to investigate the overall state of non-English majors’ level of metacognitive knowledge.
Drawing on the literature of Phakiti (2003) and Liu Huijun (2004), the author designed the questionnaire
from three aspects of metacognitive knowledge, that is, person variable, task variable and strategy
variable. Every item of the questionnaire was deliberately devised to elicit information relevant to each
dimension of metacognitive knowledge of English reading.
The questionnaire contained forty-eight items and used a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “never” or
“strongly disagree” (A = 1) to “always” or “strongly agree” (E = 5). The structure and item distribution
are described in Table 1.
Table 1 structure and item distribution of QMK of students
1) Reading strategies
Item 1-22 related to the students’ use of the strategies of planning,
(strategy variable)
self-management, selective attention, monitoring and evaluating.
2) Reading purpose (task variable)
Item 23-27 related to the students’ aims to do English reading.
3) Efficient reading strategy
(strategy variable)
4 Task difficulty (task variable)
Item 28-33 related to reading strategies a reader thinks which make the
reading efficient.
Item 34-40 related to aspects of reading which make the reading difficult.
5) Good readers
(reader variable)
6)Remediation strategies
(strategy variable)
Item41-44 related to reading behaviors of the good readers that students
agree to.
Item45-48 related to remediation strategies a reader uses when
comprehension fails.
）
The second questionnaire was designed, corresponding to the first one, for the student participants’
teachers. The aim was to investigate the present state of teachers’ metacognitive knowledge in teaching
reading and to explore whether there was a relationship between the students’ and their teachers’
metacognitive knowledge of English reading. The structure and item distribution are described in Table
2.
1) Reading strategies
(strategy variable)
Table 2 structure and item distribution of QMK of teachers
Item 1-22 related to the teachers’ use of the metacognitive strategies
during teaching reading.
4) Efficient reading
strategies (strategy variable)
3) Task difficulty
(task variable)
4) Good readers
(reader variable)
Item 23-29 related to reading strategies the teachers think which make
the reading efficient.
Item 30-34 related to teachers’ opinion about the factors which make
the students’ reading difficult.
Item35-38 related to reading behaviors of the best readers that teachers
agree to.
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5) Remediation strategies
(strategy variable)
6) Teachers’ knowledge of
metacognitive theory
Item39-42 related to remediation strategies the teachers think when
comprehension fails.
Item 43-44 related to the state of the teachers’ knowledge of
metacognitive theory
The data from the questionnaires were keyed into a computer and SPSS15.0 was employed to analyze
the statistics.
2.2 Interview
After the questionnaires, some students were interviewed about matacognition in English reading. The
questions in the interview are as follows:
1. In your opinion, what kind of reader can be seen as a good reader?
2. What is the goal of your English reading? Do you often read English after class?
3. What kinds of problems do you usually meet during the reading comprehension?
How did you deal with these difficulties?
4. Have you ever made any reading plans? If you have, please illustrate the details of the plans and how
you carried them out.
5. Please recall and tell your reading process during each reading activity.
3 Analysis and Discussion
3.1 Results of questionaires
Some results of the descriptive statistics of metacognitive knowledge of English reading of college
students and teachers are compared to find whether there is a relationship between the level of
metacognitive knowledge of the students and that of their teachers.
Firstly, the frequency of students’ use of English reading metacognitive strategies and teachers’ in
teaching reading is presented in Table3.
Table 3 statistics of the students’ and teachers’ metacognitive strategies
Teachers
Item
22
Minimum
2.3688
Maximum
4.0938
Mean
3.382127
Std. Deviation
.5627130
Students
22
2.3370
3.7945
2.905991
.4778586
Generally speaking, the frequency of the students’ use of metacognitive strategies (Mean 2.905991)
belongs to the media scale. That is to say, the subjects sometimes use metacognitive strategies in the
reading process. But the score 2.905991 is still far away from 5(always), which means that though the
students sometimes can use metacognitive strategies, they don’t have enough metacognitive strategy
knowledge for reading.
Table 3 also indicates that, compared with the students’ mean of the use of metacognitive strategies, the
teachers’ in teaching is relatively high. But the score 3.382127 is also much lower than 5(always), which
implies that they do not often use metacognitive strategies in teaching.
By comparing the students’ and teachers’ use of each type of metacognitive strategies, we can see more
clearly their similarities from Table 4.
Table 4
means of each type of metacognitive strategies used by teachers and students
Means
Metacognitive Strategy Types
Students
Teachers
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Planning
2.3655
2.6875
Self-management
2.6027
3.2188
Selective attention
3.2680
3.7094
Monitoring
Evaluating
2.9418
2.4434
3.1875
2.5703
From Table 4, we can see that both the students and teachers employ “selective attention” strategy most,
while use “planning” and evaluating” strategies least. The reasons are still unclear, but it might because
teachers focus more on the selective attention strategy and less on planning and evaluating strategy.
However, there does exist some inconsistence. For instance, teachers usually instruct different reading
strategies according to different texts (Mean 3.9063) while students use different reading strategies
according to different texts much less (Mean 2.6233), that is to say, the students do not know well how
to use suitable strategies for different styles of writings. Another surprising difference lies in Item
“noticing the structure and organization of texts”, the teachers’ average score is 3.9375 but the students’
is 2.3370. It implies that although the teachers emphasize this strategy, the students do not pay much
attention to it.
Secondly, the students’ and teachers’ conceptions about factors causing reading difficulty are compared,
as shown in Table 5.
Table 5 teachers’ and students’ conception about factors causing reading difficulty
Means
Statement(abbreviated)
Teachers
Students
too many new words
3.4521
3.7500
lack of background knowledge
3.3562
3.3438
not knowing the main idea of text
2.9178
3.3438
complex grammar and sentence
ambiguity of passage structure
2.9795
2.8836
3.2813
3.2500
boring reading material
3.1712
2.9673
As to task variables which make reading difficult, the table shows that both the students and teachers
view “new words and background knowledge” as the biggest difficulty. The students think the next
difficulties are “boring content and grammar”, while the teachers do not pay much attention to these two
factors and regard “lack of ability to grasp the main idea of the text” as one bigger obstacle in students’
reading.
3.2 Results of interviews
Reader variable
For the question: “what kind of reader can be seen as a good reader?” most students think one’s
vocabulary and grammar competence is equal to his reading proficiency. That is, they believe that a
reader would seldom come across the difficulty during reading if they have much vocabulary.
Task variable
For this dimension, questions were asked as the following: What is the goal of your English reading? Do
you often read English after class? Most of the students have the same opinion just as one student said:
“I seldom read English newspapers or magazines. I read English passage on papers only to get correct
answers, not to get some information acquire some knowledge. For me, reading English is for
examination, not for knowledge. I only do the comprehension questions.” As to the obstacles of reading,
，
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all of them hold that vocabulary is the biggest difficulty.
Strategy variable
Most students know some cognitive strategies of reading, such as skimming, scanning, predicting the
word’s meaning in the context and activate the relevant background knowledge and so on. But in the
interviews, the author finds that the students only know these strategies and they seldom employ them to
solve the problems of comprehension without the teacher’s intervenes. It implies that they lack in
metacognitive strategies in different conditions during reading.
4 Conclusion
The results of questionnaires and interviews indicate that the level of students’ metacognitive knowledge
of English reading is significantly low. Unfortunately, their English teachers know very little about the
metacognitive theory and the level of their awareness of employing metacognitive strategies in teaching
reading is also low. Both the students and the teachers employ selecting attention category most
frequently, while the planning and evaluating categories are the least used strategies. Both the students
and teachers view “new words and background knowledge” as the biggest difficulty. There are also
some discrepancies between the students’ and their teachers’ opinions and behaviors, which implies that
the teachers must conduct the metacognitive strategy training so that the students can master the
procedural and conditional knowledge well and put it into the practice of reading.
To sum up, metacognitive theory provides a new insight to the teaching of English reading. Therefore
the English teachers should attach importance to it and guide their students theoretically and practically
in order that the training results can be transferred to English learning and other studies, hence
improving students’ ability in autonomous learning.
References
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Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2001:137~138
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