Metacognitive Strategies to Develop Chinese Speaking Skills for Junior School Students Learning Chinese as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the impact of metacognitive strategy on students’ Chinese speaking skills development by using students’ self-assessments and teacher comments to cultivate students’ capacity in metacognition. Stratified sampling was adopted in this research; a total of 36 junior school sample students (17 students from Grade 8, 19 students from Grade 9) from Sacred Heart College Chiangmai who were learning Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) participated in this study. In order to explore the application and impact of metacognitive strategy, teaching intervention was conducted during the research process including pre-test, oral Chinese activities implementation with metacognitive training strategies, building up students’ metacognitive learning ability by students’ self-assessments and teacher comments, post-test. Content analysis was applied to analyze the students’ self-assessments to recognize their metacognitive learning ability and explore their distribution of the metacognitive learning acts. The results revealed that students could apply the MLC (Metacognitive Learning Cycle) model to conduct metacognitive learning, however, a stronger emphasis was placed on the monitoring strategy. Paired Samples T-Test was adopted to analyze data in the pre-test and post-test score and the result showed that the post-test mean scores (M=13.25) of students’ oral Chinese activities significantly improved compared to the pre-test mean scores (M=11.58), and is statistically significant difference (t=7.77, p<0.01). This indicates that metacognitive strategies have a positive impact on the development of students’ Chinese speaking skills. This study offers a new perspective for metacognitive teaching strategies on teaching CFL, especially in promoting students’ speaking skills, which contribute to the development of teaching CFL in the education industry. However, evidence also reveals that the students’ distribution of metacognitive learning is imbalanced, therefore, it is suggested that teachers who lecture CFL should further develop metacognitive strategies to focus students’ attention on self-diagnosis strategy, regulation strategy, and reflection strategy. This will help facilitate students’ reflection on metacognitive learning, thereby continuously promoting the development of CFL teaching quality in cultivating students’ Chinese speaking skills.

Keywords

• metacognitive strategies
• chinese speaking skills
• junior school students
• learning cfl