Аннотация:The present study is designed to investigate the overall situation of the metacognitive strategies employed in reading by foreign language learners.The subjects of this study were 160 non-English major freshmen from Wuhan Institute of Technology.Data were collected through the questionnaire, and analyzed in SPSS 16.0.Descriptive analysis were employed to do the data analysis.The paper aims to answer the following questions: 1. whether the students are proficient at using metacognitive strategies in English as a second language reading? 2. Which metacognitive strategies are used more often?The results showed that students demonstrate different proficiency of the use of metacognitive strategies in reading practice.The planning strategies are the most frequently used.