论文总字数：31353字

摘 要

在英语语言学习中，词汇是长时间影响学生语言能力的关键点。如果没有足够的词汇量，学生就不能顺利进行听说读写。恰当的策略的应用是进行高效的词汇教学和学习的重要方法。元认知策略是一种可以提高学生自主学习能力的策略。它主要引导学生计划他们的学习过程，对其进行调节和监控。在最后，学生还需要对他们的学习结果进行评估。

本文以元认知策略理论为基础，探讨了元认知策略在高中英语词汇教学中的应用过程。在词汇教学过程中，教师通过训练培养学生元认知策略知识，让学生对词汇的全过程进行有效规划、监控和评价，以此提高学生的词汇学习能力。

关键词：元认知策略；词汇；高中英语教学

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1 Definition and classifications of meta-cognitive strategy 2

2.2 Overseas study about vocabulary teaching and meta-cognitive strategy 4

2.3 Domestic study about vocabulary teaching and meta-cognitive strategy 5

3. Application of Meta-cognitive Strategy in High School English Vocabulary Teaching 6

3.1 Significance of meta-cognitive strategy for vocabulary learning and teaching 6

3.2 Pre-class 7

3.3 While-class 8

3.4 After-class 10

4. Conclusion 10

Works Cited 12

1. Introduction

Voice, grammar and vocabulary are the main factors which form a language, and vocabulary is the most important one among them. The linguistician Wilkins said, “Without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.” The students under new curriculum standard are required to master more vocabulary and use it in daily communication smoothly. Our country has focused on the training of passage and communicative ability which lead to the vocabulary teaching’s being ignored somewhat. However, the requirements of vocabulary level in new curriculum standard has been improved which also makes many students and teachers recognize that the reform of vocabulary is necessary. Therefore, it is important to implement meta-cognitive strategy in vocabulary teaching.

After the college entrance examination every year, there are many students who feel that they don’t have enough vocabulary when they do English reading. Many students are not interested in language learning originally and they find it hard to remember many words. They meet with more and more words they don’t know which makes them lose the interest in English learning gradually or even they may abandon English learning at last.

Vocabulary teaching nowadays has many disadvantages. Teachers spend lots of time and energy, only to find that the results are inconspicuous. In our vocabulary teaching, almost teachers don’t teach students based on the strategy and theory. To most students, what is difficult to them is how to learn and master vocabulary. Thus, teaching students the strategy and methods of learning effectively is more important. Just as the old say going, “teaching one to fish is better than giving him fish.”

There are many problems in vocabulary learning and teaching. Students don’t have a good method to remember words which lead to that they cannot remember words for a long time. The second problem is that students lack good habit in learning vocabulary. They often learn words without the contact with context. Besides, when they meet with new words, they prefer to consult the dictionary instead of guessing the meaning according to the context. The third one is the high rate of oblivion which exists commonly. Students’ nonstandard pronunciation and not reviewing in time all lead to this problem. Besides, many students lack confidence and willpower and they have not adjusted their methods from junior high school to senior high school. Students can be affected by their emotions and study backgrounds. The main reason is that students have hardly accepted systematic training in learning strategy and they don’t have good self-study ability so that they cannot do a good plan, management and supervisory control of their learning process. Thus, there has a necessity that teachers should introduce meta-cognitive strategy to high school English vocabulary teaching.

The thesis overall structure consists of four parts: introduction, literature review, application of meta-cognitive strategy in high school English vocabulary teaching and conclusion.

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the positive influence of meta-cognitive strategy in high school English vocabulary teaching.

2. Literature Review

Study includes the form, shape, classification, semantic of words and the rules of how to use words. Lewis thought vocabulary is the combination of many words. Domestic scholars have focused on vocabulary teaching recent years and different educators study vocabulary teaching and relevant questions in different aspects. The views include cognitive, cognitive linguistics, semantics, stylistics, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication. There are also many scholars who started to study the relationship meta-cognitive and vocabulary teaching. What these researches convey to us is that vocabulary teaching is very important and apply strategies to it is much more important.

2.1 Definition and classifications of meta-cognitive strategy

Different scholars have different definitions of meta-cognitive strategies in different perspectives. There are close relationships between meta-cognition and cognition, but they are different indeed.

The meta-cognitive strategy theory developed on the basis of psychology. The term of meta-cognition was first pointed out by an American psychologist and scholar, John Flavell, in the 1970s. Flavell states, “meta-cognition refers to someone"s knowledge about his own mental process”, which means “monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of these processes in specific objectives” (Flavell, 1970). He stated that meta-cognition involves “active monitoring and consequent regulation and evaluation of cognitive process to achieve cognitive goals.” Then he pointed out that the “internal processing that one makes full use to adjust and control memory and other learning processes.” The reason why it is called meta-cognition is that its core meaning is “cognition about cognition”.

There are also many other scholars who defined meta-cognition from their own perspectives, including Kluwe, Wittrock, O’Malley, Chamot, Taylor and so on. For instance, Kluwe’s definition of meta-cognition is “meta-cognition is one"s recognition about the thinking which one uses to adjust and monitor his or her own learning” (Kluwe, 1982). In 1987, Wittrock defined meta-cognition refers to the control and awareness of a person’s thinking process. In addition, O’Malley and Chamot defined meta-cognition as “knowledge of one"s cognitive process regarding with the learning and cognitive processes of others”(O’Malley and Chamot, 1990). Taylor put forward the term of meta-cognition as “an appreciation what one already knows, together with a correct comprehension of the learning task and what kind of knowledge and skills it requires, including the ability to make correct ratiocination on applying one’s strategic knowledge to a special circumstance, and complete it efficiently and reliably.”(Taylor, 1999).

Meta-cognitive strategies mean applying the theory of meta-cognition of learning or as a standard to study. The term of meta-cognitive strategies was firstly mentioned by Hosenfeld in 1977. He did a research on children thinking process, and found that monitoring the current memory contents is one of the effective properties of meta-cognition. (Hosenfeld, 1977)

Brown (1983) regards meta-cognitive strategies as a series of sequential processes that learners use to monitor cognitive activities, and at the same time be sure that cognitive objectives have been met with. (Brown, 1983)

Cohen (2000) defines meta-cognitive strategies as a solution to pre-assessment and pre-planing, online planning, evaluation as well as post-evaluation of learning activities and language usage events. The learning activities refer to the planning of how to deal with learning tasks, monitoring comprehension and evaluating progress.

But among all the scholars, O’Malley and Chamot (1990) make a more comprehensive definition . They view the meta-cognitive strategies are “the higher order executive process skills that may entail planning, evaluating or monitoring the success of learning ability.”

The meta-cognitive strategy main includes three parts: planning strategy, monitoring strategy and adjustment strategy. Planning strategy refers to learner’" action of making plans for a entire year, a month and even a day. Besides, it also means planning of when and how to preview or review. Monitoring strategy contains monitoring, production monitoring, auditory monitoring, plan monitoring, and style monitoring. It is of great importance in the whole learning process, which is used by learners to check one’s accuracy and appropriateness of one’s performance. Evaluation strategy is learners’ inspection of the consequences of one’s language learning so that measures can be taken to satisfy the given task favorably. It includes productive evaluating, ability evaluating, performance evaluating, and strategies evaluating.

To sum up what is mentioned above, meta-cognition is that the subject regards what cognitive activities it is doing as cognition and cognitive object, adjusting and monitoring its cognitive process actively during the whole cognitive activity.

2.2 Overseas study about vocabulary teaching and meta-cognitive strategy

Schmit (1995) pointed out strategies of the guidance to the students. Even the similarities and differences of strategies application in successful learners and less successful learners were compared by many linguists. Among them, the representative linguisticians are the following: Knight (1994) suggested that when we were reading, guessing the meaning of words can help us master a large number of vocabulary; McCarthy (1990) also studyed vocabulary learning strategies, and he said that the contextualization strategies can help students to make a long-term memorization to a great extent, and he claimed that contextualization strategy should be widely applied. Peter Skehan (1998) supported that reflection, monitoring and evaluation were the conclusive factors for applying learning strategies. He required that learners could obtain holistic learning skills unless they didn"t ignore these factors in learning process. Ellis (1999) held the point that vocabulary learning strategies are the specific strategies in learning vocabulary, which includes general ways and explicit actions applied by language learners to promote their learning results. Allen (2002) put forward that when students felt that they lack vocabulary, they would learn vocabulary more effectively in class by applying some vocabulary learning strategies.

At the same time, linguisticians made different classifications of vocabulary learning strategies. For example, Schmitt (2002) classified strategies into two types: “There are two groups of strategies: one of the group is discovery strategies and the the other is consolidation strategies. When words are first met, discovery strategies can determine the meaning of words. When words are met again, consolidation strategies can consolidate word"s meaning.”

According to the literature overseas, it can be found that a lot of reseaches have been done to apply different learning strategies to vocabulary learning.

2.3 Domestic study about vocabulary teaching and meta-cognitive strategy

The domestic studies on language resource from vocabulary. The domestic study on vocabulary teaching focused on vocabulary memorizing. There are a variety of lectures and books about it. Among these, many features of English vocabulary have been reflected. Intensifying the vocabulary understanding and memorizing by concluding the rules of vocabulary features. Besides, the same features can be existed among words, concluding the same features will also be helpful to vocabulary memorizing. After the appearance of communicative vocabulary teaching methods, it is undesirable to memorize words without the context. Lu Qiaoling (2001), Chen Aimei (2002) and Yu Chunmei (2005) pointed out that teaching vocabulary in the relevant context is one of the most effective ways in learning English vocabulary. Teachers should guide students to discuss what they are interested in during their daily life by using English language knowledge and vocabulary. In that case, it will be easier for students to master the concrete context of vocabulary and to achieve the goal of communication.

From the literature review in China, it can be found that the previous studies of vocabulary learning strategies have attained many achievements and provided us with some useful implications for our language teaching with theories.

Researches of vocabulary teaching strategies abroad and at home covered many aspects. But the main researches on meta-cognitive strategies at home are based on theories overseas. However, high school period is the crucial period of learning. Therefore, the research on meta-cognitive strategy about high school vocabulary teaching becomes especially important. Professor Wang Wenyu (1998) made a research on the correlation between vocabulary learning results and learning strategies in 50 college students. He discovered that few students can use strategies to learn English vocabulary well by reading widely. O’Malley (1990) designed a set of teaching approaches to help learners to improve their ability of learning language. That is called Meta-cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach. This kind of teaching methods focus on learners’ development and training of the meta-cognitive strategies. The goal of meta-cognitive strategies training is to monitor, plan and evaluate the entire process of the learning effectively. This method has achieved obvious effect in different teaching situations for various learners. Therefore, high school students need more practical vocabulary teaching methods. There are more and more experts and scholars who devote themselves into the research on vocabulary teaching methods.But their subjects are main college students. Only very few of the experts and scholars take high school students as subjects.

Therefore, this thesis has been doing a research on the application of meta-cognitive strategy in high school English vocabulary teaching, with the hope that this can be of some use to high school students and teachers.

3. Application of Meta-cognitive Strategy in High School English Vocabulary Teaching

Meta-cognitive strategy plays a crucial role in high school vocabulary learning. Students’ self-study ability is a very important factor to accumulate vocabulary. Not only should they process and conduct the learning materials, but also monitor and adjust their learning process actively at the same time. There are three main meta-cognitive strategies which are frequently-used in high school English vocabulary teaching: planning strategy, monitoring strategy and evaluation strategy.

3.1 Significance of meta-cognitive strategy for vocabulary learning and teaching

Vocabulary teaching is the important component in high school English teaching. Teachers need to apply all kinds of methods to attract students’ attention in vocabulary learning and coordinate teachers’ vocabulary teaching if they want to achieve the high efficiency in vocabulary teaching to some extent or complete their vocabulary teaching tasks with high quality. Meta-cognitive strategy can help teachers guide students’ vocabulary learning activities.

There are many advantages that meta-cognitive strategy has in vocabulary learning and teaching. Meta-cognitive strategy can help students make clear what their learning target is. Therefore, students could make a plan of vocabulary learning target which is suitable for them before vocabulary learning activities. Besides, they should point out what they should complete and what kind of extent they should reach in which period explicitly. They will avoid blindness and irrationality to a great extent, struggling for their goals to improve learning efficiency if they do these with the guidance of their learning target.

Meta-cognitive strategy also can help improve students monitoring ability, promoting the formation of scientific evaluation ability. Students should inspect and conclude during their learning process constantly and evaluate their learning process and periodical learning results in time so that they can correct their mistakes duly. In addition, in vocabulary learning process, with continuous improvement of the ability to apply meta-cognitive strategy, students’ self-evaluation ability will improve as well and will be more and more scientific.

The use of meta-cognitive strategy can improve students self-study ability. From the plan of learning to the achievement of target, students are doing learning activities actively during the whole process and they can locate and make up the deficiencies. They will find it obviously that they are the dominant power in learning process with the guidance of this kind of learning strategy so that they can correct and improve themselves continuously, in which case, their study interest could be motivated to improve their initiative and positivity in vocabulary learning as well as their self-study ability.

3.2 Pre-class

To English learners, everyone has a study plan which is suitable for them and the plan can be divided into long-term plan and short-term plan. Therefore, teachers need to help students make proper study plan, such as how many words should be mastered in one week and which word is important than others. Teachers should also guide students how to recognize themselves, including their self-study ability and their vocabulary standards. In this way, students will be inspired to learn English more actively. Besides, the memory of words should also have an effective plan, following the objective rules of vocabulary memory to avoid passive machinery memory. According to the German psychologist Ebbinghaus’ theory of forgetting curve, the oblivion begins 20minutes later after the knowledge which is remembered just now and it follows the rule of first quick back slow. Therefore, teachers could make plans for students according to the forgetting curve, reviewing what they have learned terminally. Besides, teachers can let students do some recitation and write from memory by using a variety of methods. Students are not interested in the things that have been in their memory and they are likely to forget what is meaningless and unfamiliar. Therefore, teachers should classify the words what will be remembered before making plans. For example, teachers could classify the frequent-used words, interesting words and the characteristic or property of a certain word to strengthen the memory. In addition, they should try their best to transform negative words to enlarge students’ active vocabulary. Checking the condition of vocabulary learning by vocabulary tests terminally and adjust the vocabulary learning strategy in time according to the condition, making a conclusion of the vocabulary learning situation to correct the mistakes in vocabulary learning process so that vocabulary learning could move more smoothly.

In order to apply meta-cognitive strategy to English vocabulary teaching properly, teachers need to guide students to improve the ability of meta-cognition. Only in this way can solve the problem of how to learn. The recognition of meta-cognition can help students improve the efficiency of vocabulary learning and the effectivity of vocabulary teaching.

3.3 While-class

In teachers’ teaching, especially in teaching reading class, there are many vocabulary teaching which has no context or artificial context. Teachers are accustomed to teaching words intensively before class; explaining the pronunciation, characteristics and the usage of words; trying their best to sweep difficult words for students’ reading. Then teachers start to explain the content, analyzing the structure of the text which may help students master the content quickly, but it is not effective for vocabulary teaching because this kind of vocabulary teaching doesn’t have created context. Thought teachers often make up some sentences when they explain words, the single sentence cannot reflect the words’ specific usage and it is also hard for students to output the words that they have learned.

The theory of context learning has been well-accepted. Harmer pointed out that “students need to observe how to use words according to the context.” Besides, there are also many other experts who hold the view that it is a very effective vocabulary teaching strategy to learn and remember words by using context. It is also easier to apply it to vocabulary learning and teaching.

In English vocabulary teaching, teachers need to train students’ recognition of meta-cognitive strategy and to monitor them develop the good self-study habit to improve their ability of self-study and accumulate English words in concrete class vocabulary teaching, teachers also have to master different vocabulary teaching strategy so that they can apply it to English vocabulary teaching targeted.

In practical teaching, teachers could produce the relative context to introduce some important vocabulary. For example, in the textbook module two unit five music, teachers could show the words in advance and let students know some about the words according to the context. Then, teachers could create concrete context to promote students’ learning. Triggering students’ interest to vocabulary learning by using interesting materials to create concrete context and teachers can set an example for students so that they can follow teachers.

Teachers should make vocabulary teaching return to life and start from students’ daily experience and interest so that the content and methods should be attached to reality. Combining vocabulary teaching and students’ life to find out what will resonate and inspire their interest. In addition, teachers could let students create appropriate context by using the words which they have learned before. In that case, students could solidify their foundation and improve their ability to use language.

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