A Correlative Study On Metacognitive Knowledge And Listening Comprehension Of Chinese College Students

Metacognition is generally defined as cognition about cognition or thinking about one's own thinking, serving as self-directed, executive, self-regulatory functions in cognitive activities. It includes metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies. Metacognitive knowledge refers to the set of facts or variables learners acquire about learning as they are applied and used to gain knowledge and acquire skills in varied situation. It can be subcategorized into person knowledge, task knowledge, and strategy knowledge. Metacognitive strategies involve planning, monitoring, evaluating, and modifying learners' learning processes and approaches. Since 1979 when Flavell brought the concept in a study of children's cognitive development, studies have been carried out to investigate the relationship between metacognition and second language acquisition (SLA). But those insufficient research efforts did not pay enough attention to the importance of metacognitive knowledge. In China, the study in this field has just begun, and only few studies have reached out into the metacognitive knowledge and English reading comprehension.Listening is an important language skill. Previous research on listening has emerged in five major factors: text characteristics, interlocutor characteristics, task characteristics, listener characteristics and process characteristics. As the emphasis of language teaching shifts from teacher-centered methods to student-centered, research on the characteristics of listener, task and process needs to be conducted more intensively and extensively.In the light of the importance of metacognitive knowledge, the purpose of this study is to gain an overall picture of college student' metacognitive knowledge about English listening comprehension, and to have a deep understanding of foreign language learning form learner's perspective on Chinese learning context. Besides, we hope this research can supply some information concerning Chinese learners to the worldwide research in this field.This research investigated one hundred and three subjects by two objective tests anda questionnaire. All the collected data and analyses are operated on a person computer by using SPSS 10.0From the investigation, we find that Chinese college students have a moderate coverage and usage of their metacognitive knowledge when listening. Their metacognitive knowledge is positively linked to their listening comprehension (LC) abilities and language proficiency; and that the high and low metacognitive listeners show major distinction in their LC and proficiency test scores. Based on these results, two regression models are established to predict students' performance in listening comprehension test and proficiency test. Further, we notice several problems arising from in the study. Strategy knowledge shown by students is poorer than task knowledge and person knowledge, and their procedural and conditional knowledge has argent needs to be expanded.Since the study of this kind can give us a deeper understanding of the learning psychology and language process, we suggest that the study of metacognitive knowledge and listening comprehension should be incorporated into the language learning and teaching system, because metacognition is a critical variable affecting English learning proficiency. Its influence is domain-general. We propose a couple of pedagogical methods to promoting students' metacognitive knowledge and awareness. Owing to the validation of the self-designed questionnaire and the complexity of the study of learners, some remaining research problems as well as directions for future research are pointed out in the final part of the thesis.