In the background of globalization, there is more and more cultural communication between China and western country. Therefore, English, as a tool of communication, plays an important role. English learning is attached to importance. As one of the necessary learning skills, reading is the primary input and contributes a great deal to listening, speaking and writing. It is an active process to acquire information and learn new knowledge. Considering above factors, many researchers think highly of reading teaching. They have been studied on it, especially on reading strategies that are effective methods of reading comprehension.

    The New Curriculum standards for Junior English Teaching state that the junior three students should read an accumulation of more than 150,000 words. They can imply and understand the meaning of new words, according to the context and word formation. They should realize the logical relationship between sentences. They can acquire information by simple reading strategies with different reading purposes. The current status of reading learning still exists problems through examination in school and tests in class. Many junior school students have trouble doing reading comprehension.

In general, the reading proficiency of students is still not up to the requirements of the curriculum standards. There are problems in the teaching of English reading in junior high school, which severely restricts the effectiveness of education. It is neglected that students lack the cultivation of reading interest and the ability of self-regulated learning. This research focuses on the effect of metacognitive strategy training in junior high school.

1.2 Purpose of Research 

As many students have no awareness of the effect of reading strategies and need effective way to improve their ability of reading comprehension, the research studies on the impact of metacognitive strategy training on reading comprehension. The two main purposes of the research are as follows:

    1) Based on the theories of metacognition and reading, the research aims to explore grade 8 in junior high school students’ metacognitive strategy use in reading. 

2) The research aims to find out how metacognitive strategy training in reading class may affect grade 8 students’ reading comprehension performance.

1.3 Significance of Research

Reading is essential and challenging part of junior English teaching. Reading comprehension covers more than 30% in senior high school entrance examination. According to the outline of junior English, in the teaching procedure, teachers aim to train students’ learning abilities and especially improve students’ reading ability. 

During the internship, researcher finds that most students are weak at reading comprehension. In traditional teaching, the subjects of reading course seem only to learn pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary with the help of the passage in class. But in recent years, it is evident that some reading skills have been shown with reading material in the textbook. Teachers have made an effort to teach some reading strategies rather than only analyzing the details of passage through the teaching procedure. However, the result of such teaching sometimes seems unsatisfying entirely through the scores of reading comprehension students got. The research wants to study the effect of metacognitive strategies applied in English reading classes of junior high school through experiments.

1.4 Outline of research

The research consists of five sections. Following this introductory section in which background of the research, purposes and significance of the study are presented, Section 2 reviews the related literature, including theories of metacognition, studies on the strategies and reading, and studies on strategy training. 元认知策略在初中英语阅读教学中的应用研究(3):http://www.chuibin.com/yingyu/lunwen_205884.html