Филологические науки/1. Методика преподавания языка и литературы

Ст.преподаватель, Фёдорова М.Л.

Костанайский государственный университет им.А.Байтурсынова

On metacognitive strategies in teaching foreign languages

Formation of abilities of independent development of language skills should become an integral part of students’ training to a foreign language in higher educational establishments. In the development of the autonomy of educational skills, it should be noted that the researchers identify implicit and explicit methods of administration, and the formation of learning strategies. The first - the student masters the strategy of simply doing a job, not having been informed about the purpose and value of a single strategy, i.e. unconsciously (unreflected formation of educational strategies). The second - the learner informed, how to use this strategy, as it is useful in a certain kind of work ,it allows students to master consciously the learning strategy, understanding the psychological mechanisms of executable action, as their individual psychological characteristics. The formation of metacognitive strategies in students is undoubtedly able to improve the efficiency of learning a foreign language. Nowadays English language teachers have benefited from a growing body of research that describes how learning strategies can help students improve their acquisition of the language. Learning strategies are organized into three main categories: social-affective, cognitive, and metacognitive. Social-affective strategies include interacting and cooperating with others to assist learning; cognitive strategies involve manipulating the language to be learned; and metacognitive strategies encourage learners to reflect on thought processes and to plan, monitor, and evaluate aspects of their learning. These strategies can be valuable instructional tools, especially for the reading skill, because many teachers find that there is insufficient practice time for students who are required to cope with studying a new language and to read for content. The need is heightened because at the post-secondary level, and particularly in universities English suddenly becomes increasingly important for students who must learn the professionally-oriented foreign language and read technical subject matter in English. It is important to encourage activities that require the use of strategies such as scanning (reading a text quickly for specific details), and skimming (reading or previewing a text to find the main idea), at the lessons these terms are no more than clichés, and very little training is provided on how to actually use these strategies. As a result, students experience difficulties when reading research articles in subjects related to science and technology. In this context, where being able to read efficiently and effectively is essential for academic success, training students to use learning strategies can have a significant effect. Since the goal of metacognitive learning strategies is to strengthen students’ awareness of what makes their language learning successful, it is especially important for the teacher to understand how to use such strategies. Metacognition and reading indicate that reading long selections of text quickly for general comprehension, which most fluent readers can do in their native language, is difficult to achieve and may not be a skill that is readily transferable to their second language. At the lesson, many students tend to rely on the slow and careful reading of texts from start to finish, and they have difficulties with reading activities requiring the use of strategies for reading quickly and efficiently, such as skimming a lengthy research article for main ideas. As many practitioners have found, metacognitive strategies are one way to overcome these problems. Metacognition is variously defined as “cognition of cognition”, “the conscious awareness of cognitive process, and “knowledge about learning”. In relation to reading comprehension, metacognition is the “knowledge that takes as its object or regulates any aspect of any cognitive endeavor”. This definition suggests that metacognition not only relates to the individual thought processes one uses to learn but also to the self-regulation of cognition. Metacognitive strategies include an ability to manage and regulate consciously the use of appropriate learning strategies for different situations .They involve an awareness of student’s mental processes and an ability to reflect on how one learns, in other words, knowing about one’s knowing.” Metacognitive strategies include selective attention to the task, planning, self-monitoring, and self-evaluating. As applied to reading, these metacognitive strategies entail specifying a purpose for reading, planning how the text will be read, self-monitoring for errors in reading comprehension, and self-evaluating how well the overall objectives are being fulfilled, which allows for taking corrective measures if comprehension is not being achieved.

Even though students’ reading ability can be improved when they discover and use specific learning strategies, research indicates that it is not sufficient to present discrete lists of strategies and suggests that setting up contexts where the reasons for strategy use are made explicit may help readers better appreciate strategies and use them more effectively.

However, with strategy training, readers can make concrete gains in their reading. This training must be clearly sequenced. In addition, there must be a clear rationale for using specific strategies. For example, strategy training should include explicit instructions on when and how to use a particular strategy, and should incorporate metacognitive elements of planning, self-monitoring, and self-evaluation into the task. When this is accomplished, metacognitive strategy improves students’ efficiency in reading research articles, particularly with tasks requiring fast, selective reading such as skimming.

Any training technology aims at improving the efficiency of the process of acquiring and learning new skills through the use of various reserves, e.g. due to a more rational organization of training, careful planning classroom and extracurricular work, more focused organization material (use of audio, video and et al.), a more fruitful use of internal resources of students and others.