中学英语写作中的元认知策略(1)(4)
2015-11-21 01:03
导读：‘Learning strategies’, the special things or behaviors that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn, or retain new information”[3]P1. In recent years, scholars from home and abroad have i
‘Learning strategies’, the special things or behaviors that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn, or retain new information”[3]P1. In recent years, scholars from home and abroad have introduced much research to this field. It’s proved that both cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies benefit learners. But as English teaching involved, one problem is that researches on them are unbalanced, for more researches have been down on cognitive strategies than on meta-cognitive strategies. The other problem is that meta-cognitive strategies which research on listening, speaking, reading and writing are unbalanced, for few researches prefer to study writing strategies.3. The Connection between Meta-cognitive Strategies and Middle School English Writing
3.1 Meta-cognition
Researchers have been studying meta-cognition for over twenty years. It is most broadly defined as awareness and control of one’s learning. Hu Zhuxue said that in the 1970s, the famous psychologist Favell holds that the prefix “meta” literally means “beyond”. Meta-cognition therefore means “beyond” cognition ”. Liu li said that it was the process of using cognitive processes to improve thinking skills. And it was called meta-cognition because its core meaning was “cognition about cognition”. Researches have proved that there are great connections between learners' meta-cognitive knowledge and their choice of language strategies. Meta-cognitive knowledge and meta-cognitive strategies are two indispensable factors in both learning and acquisition. It’s improper to neglect meta-cognitive knowledge. Meta-cognitive knowledge can be the initial step, on the basis of which learners develop their meta-cognitive and other strategies.
Meta-cognitive knowledge and meta-cognitive strategies also interact with each other. Without meta-cognitive knowledge, middle school students often feel hard to use appropriate strategies when dealing with a title, which will at last lead to fossilization in the strategy application. Middle school students firstly acquire meta-cognitive strategies by imitating. They use some meta-cognitive strategies unconsciously in writing, but can’t tell the reasons behind them. This is obviously not enough. In this case the involvement of meta-cognitive knowledge, learners reconsider and reconstruct meta-cognitive strategies and the other strategies, knowing not only “how” but also “why” and “when” to use those strategies in middle schools students’ English writing. Therefore, when facing writing, students can transfer proper strategies in different phrases of writing.
3.2 Language learning strategies
It has been said that strategies applied in writing are one kind of learning strategies. So it is necessary to take a close look of learning strategies first. “Learning strategies may have an affective or conceptual basis, and may influence the learning of simple tasks, such as learning vocabulary or items in a list, or complex tasks, such as language comprehension or language production”.[4]P43
