Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of the Present Study
Since reading is regarded as an important and efficient means to gaininformation, especially for senior high school students, reading plays a moreimportant role in their studies. According to the Education Department, the UniversityEntrance Examination is a standardized and necessary test for all students. So it isnatural that students in senior high schools around China feel the pressure to gain ahigh score in the University Entrance Examination in order to enter the university.What’s more, in an English paper of the University Entrance Examination, readingcomprehension makes up 37.5% of the overall mark (The overall mark is 150 and themark of reading comprehension is 40.). However, most high school students are notefficient readers in spite of many years’ learning in the English reading. They find that more time and energy fail to achieve the desired scores as a result of some problemsin their reading processes. Affected by the traditional teaching method, in a readingclass, teachers pay more attention to explaining the vocabulary, grammar points andsentence structures, while students consider reading skills as learning new words andlanguage points, figuring out the grammatical structure of each sentence. In suchclasses, teachers are always the main characters, while students just do readingpassively. As a result, students get unsatisfactory reading performances in their exams.Therefore, for learners, how to develop reading skills and improve the readingperformances has always been a problem; for teachers, how to teach reading well andeffectively is also a difficulty to be solved.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Present Study
The present study attempts to investigate the overall situation of metacognitivestrategy use in senior high school students’ English reading so as to find effectiveways to promote the students’ interests in reading. It also aims to find out therelationship between metacognitive strategies and senior high school students’ readingcomprehension performances. The researcher hopes to provide a new method to helpwith teachers’ teaching and learners’ learning. The researcher also expects to developthe students’ autonomous learning abilities and makes students get rid of theteacher-dependent learning habits.The present study is supposed to be significant because there is little literatureabout the investigation on metacognitive strategies and English readingcomprehension, aiming at the senior high school students as the subjects, especiallymost of whom are from rural area. The significance of the present study is boththeoretical and practical. As for its theoretical significance, solving the difficulties inreading has been a hot topic and research focus. Both researchers and educatorsabroad and at home have made many efforts to work on it. They conducted studiesfrom many perspectives, including metacognitive strategies, but there is little studyaiming at senior high school students’ metacognitive strategy use and their readingcomprehension performances. Based on the results from other researchers’ studies,combining the senior high school students’ characteristics, the author tries to provethe relationship between metacognitive strategies and senior high school students’reading performances. It will provide new thoughts in this area. To some extent, itplays a positi，英语论文题目，英语论文范文
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