Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background
Teaching students how to learn to use useful learning strategies is regarded as an effective way toimprove teaching quality, achieve teaching goals and build up student's confidence, especially on secondlanguage acquisition. Furthermore, the teaching of learning strategies in the documents for Chinese CollegeTeaching is emphasized by the Ministry of Education of People's Republic of China (2004).Therefore, tensand millions of researchers have been studying the different kinds of strategies so that they can find out theeffective strategies to help those students who are striving to leam English. On one hand, English teachingnot only teaches students to master basic skills, but also makes them leam the English strategies. On theother hand，the responsibilities of a teacher are enlarged, that is，teacher is not only the person, who justimparts the learning knowledge and skills, but also the trainer, who is supposed to help students grasp thelearning strategies.The definition of meta-cognition is the cognition of cognitive activities themselves. In the 1970s,Flavell, an American psychologist, put forward the conception. And he is one of the first researches to definethe term "meta-cognition". Meta-cognition refers to control one's own process of conscious cognition toself-monitoring and self-evaluating. Meta-cognitive strategies contain three aspects: centering your learning,arranging and planning your learning, and evaluating your learning.
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1.2 Significance of Study
The question of the paper is mainly to ask how to leam English well and how to leam Englishefficiently. It shows that what the students leam are not only a foreign Imiguage, and completing the task toget good scores in examinations, but do English effectively and cultivate the interest to leam a foreignlanguage autonomously. It is widely accepted that reading is one of the most important skill among the fourlanguage skills; therefore，mastering the skills has to probe into some method，if you want to improve yourreading skills.Especially some college students majoring in minority art are not good at reading skills. When the finalexamination is coming what they expect is to pass the exam. Besides, the proficiency of some art majorstudents in minority nationalities university are weaker than that of other art students in colleges，becausein national university, they, including teachers and leaders，focus on drawing，singing, dancing soexaggerately that teachers and students ignore the importance of other academic courses. In addition to,these students majoring in art in nationalities lose interest and confidence in English because of their weakproficiency. 丁he reasons we discussed above lead to the passive attitude and lack strong motivation inlearning English skills, especially reading skills directly and indirectly.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Definition of Meta-cognition
Meta-cognition, the latest buzz word, is firstly put forward by American psychologist John Flavell(1976) in his book Cognitive Development. Then，tens and millions of language learning researchers beganto research in these aspects. Meta-cognition has been used to refer to knowledge about cognition or theregulation of cognition. It includes meta-cognitive knowledge, meta-cognitive experiences andmeta-cognitive strategies. Flavell (1978) defines meta-cognition as "one's monitors and regulates one'scognitive behavior, process actively." After Flavell, plenty of psychologists are interested in themeta-cognition research and offer different definitions of meta-cognition. Brown (1987) holds thatmeta-cognition is that individidule controls the cognitive aspects. Furthermore，Sternberg (1994) definedmeta-cognition as “thinking about thinking", through comparing the relationship between meta-cognitionand cognition.Meta-cognition is divided into two aspects: knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition,according to Brown (1987). The knowledge of cognition is one's knowledge on one's own cognitiveresources and some of compatibility knowledge between learners and learning material，that is，some ofknowledge on one's cognitive ability, on cognitive strategies.For the aspect, the regulation of cognition refers some strategies the learner uses, such as planning,regulating, monitoring, when the learner actively strives to solve the problem.
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2.2 Classification of Meta-cognition
According to Flavell (1987) and other researchers (Brown et.al，1983)，meta-cogntion is classified .Ithas three major classifications; meta-cognitive knowledge, meta-cognitive experience and meta-cognitivestrategies. Meta-cognitive knowledge is a kind of knowledge. Some of factors are in his or her own cognitiveprocesses，which are how to interact with each other. Those factors will affect cognitive processes and results.Flavell describes three categories of meta-cognitive knowledge 1) person variables 2) task variables 3)strategy variables.First, meta-cognitive knowledge is defined as one's knowledge or beliefs about the factorsthat affected cognitive activities. The person knowledge includes the individual's knowledge; inter individualknowledge and universal knowledge. Individual's knowledge is the same as a person believes that he canlearn better by listening than by reading. Inter individual knowledge indicates that a person realizes thatone's social adaptability is better than other around. Universal knowledge is defined as one's cognitiveability and may reach different levels while one gradually realizes in human development. And one mayrealize that inter individual also exist different cognitive styles. The task category is a kind of cognationabout a proposed task or some goals which contain variety of information. It is mainly divided into thecognition on cognitive material and nature of task .The strategy category involves identifying goals andsub-goals and knowing variety of strategies knowledge in completing the cognitive process.
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Chapter 3 Theoretical foundation........ 8
3.1 Metacognitive strategies........ 8
3.2 Classification of met-cognitive strategies.........9
3.3 Distinctions between cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies........ 12
3.4 Meta-cognitive -strategies and English reading........ 13
3.5 Summary of the chapter 14Chapter 4 Methodology ........15
4.1 Hypotheses........ 15
4.2 Subjects........ 15
4.3 Instruments........ 16
4.4 Procedures........ 16
4.5 Data Collection and Analysis........ 25
4.6 Summary of the Chapter ........25
Chapter 5 Results and Discussion........ 27
5.1 Research question I and the results of the questionnaire........ 27
5.2 Research question II and findings ........ 32
Chapter 5 Results and Discussion
In this chapter, we will discuss the results of the experiment we did in chapter 4. The author adopts1meta-cognitive theory and teaches Art students how to use the meta-cognitive strategies. In order to knowthe effect of the meta-cognitive strategy，the author selects two classes .One is regarded as control class andthe other class is considered as experimental class，who is in the same level and are both from the sameimajor，Art major. Then the author compares the results between the control class and experimental class.Besides, the author uses the questionnaire to know tl^eir altitude in learning English and the knowledge howmuch they have known before beginning the pre-test and after the post-test. Both the questionnaire and thetest, the author all use SPSS to analyze their results. At first, the author analyzes the results on thequestionnaire. Analyzing the questionnaire, the author adopts the independent samples test and the pairedsamples test analysis, which could analyze the data totally and completely. As for the pre-test and post-test，the author also has the independent samples and the paired samples test analysis .These data couldmake the results of the experiment clear, that is，whether the meta-cognitive strategies could help ArtIstudents of experimental class improve their reading comprehension in English . The details see figure 1.
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Conclusions
The experiment on the usage of meta-cognitive strategies was conducted in Northwest University forNationalities. The students who are involved in the study are from Art major. After four months experiment,students knew more about the meta-cognitive strategies, such as，planning，monitoring and evaluating. Afterthe experiment. Art students may use some strategies the teacher taught to solve the English readingcomprehension. The author got the result of the experiment and answered the two questions. But the result ofthe experiment is not ideal. Meanwhile, these data of the experimenflvere analyzed by the SPSS. Theempirical study demonstrates that there is not significant positive relationship between meta-cognitiveawareness md the reading abilities. That is to say, the meta-cognitive strategies have no obvious effectiveimpact on the Art students in the institute of nationalities in EC. The main reason is as follows:Firstly, it is well known that the proficiency of Art student is worse than other major students. They paymore attention to their Art major because the major can decide whether they can enter the university or not.The other majors, such as，English, no one spent more time and money on learning, because the major justoccupy a small proportion in the college entrance examination. All these aspects make these students ignoreimportance of English for long time. Little by little, the students lost interests on it. Art students are alwaysconsidered as unsuccessful learners on English, Especially in the institute of nationalities. Art students havelower proficiency on English reading comprehension. The fact can be proved by their scores of their collegeentrance of examination. The highest scores of English in the experimental class are 60.
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Reference (omitted)