The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies In College English Listening Teaching

In the past few decades learning strategy has become one of the hottest topics in the field of language learning and teaching. While early studies on learning strategies were more exploratory in nature, later researches become more theory-based and more scientific. So far, research in language learning strategies has pointed to the powerful role of metacognition in language learning, and the potential for greater use of metacognitive strategies. Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is a higher-order executive skill that involves an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge to plan, monitor and evaluate the learning process. If the students have a good command of metacognitive strategies, they are able to assess the situation, to plan, to select appropriate strategies, to coordinate them, to monitor or evaluate their effectiveness and to revise the plan where necessary. So metacognitive strategy is important to foreign language learning and teaching.However, there has been few empirical studies that have attempted to evaluate the success of this training in the field of foreign language strategy training, especially inlistening training in college classroom, and the results were not especially encouraging. So, listening strategy training remains a field that deserves further researching. Drawing on the research on learning strategies at home and abroad, this dissertation finally decides on the training of metacognitive strategies (the planning, monitoring, regulating and evaluating strategies) as the focus, probes how to integrate metacognitive strategy training into college English listening for non-English majors, and tries to prove whether or not metacognitive strategy training can help students improve their listening performance. It aims at answering the following questions:(1) Whether or not the subjects in the experimental group will outperform those in the control group in listening comprehension after one-semester training on this instructional mode?(2) Whether or not the guidance will promote the subjects' metacognitive awareness of the application of metacognitive strategies to EFL listening comprehension?The author carried out one-semester long teaching program based on metacognitive strategies among the 111 non-English major students from two intact classes in Grade One of Guangdong Hangshan Nomal University. One class of 56 that received the one-semester metacognitive instruction comprised Experimental Group;the other class of 55 served as Control Group receiving normal instruction without metacognitive component. The whole research process includes two stages: in the first stage, all the subjects regardless of from the experimental group or from the control group were asked to complete the pre-test. In the second stage, during the experiment, metacognitive strategy training was integrated into classroom teaching. After the training, all the subjects were asked to complete the post-test. The results of the pre- and post-tests were to determine whether there were any gains in listening ability over the one-semester training.The comparison of the pre- and post-tests provided data for measuring subjects' listening proficiency (research question 1). In order to make this experiment more precise and believable, the listening materials used in the study were carefully chosen from the listening sections of the previous National College English Test Band 4 Examinations (CET-4) of recent years, so they were almost at the same level of difficulty and in the similar pattern.Moreover, a questionnaire was used in this study. The questionnaire consists of two parts. Part One was based on Wen Qiufang's listening checklist (Wen Qiufang, 1995)which was used to assess the students current use of metacognitive strategies. All subjects in the experimental group were asked to complete the questionnaire immediately after the pre- and post-test. Therefore, all subjects of the Experimental group should also complete Part two of the questionnaire after they finish the post-test. The results of the questionnaire were used to answer research question 2, to see whether subjects had increased their mtacognitive awareness.This program adopted an embedded metacognitive strategy model, which consisted of four parts: developing students' metacognitive awareness;planning and arranging learning;monitoring learning behaviors;evaluating listening performance. First of all, students were taught to have a better idea of metacognition, in light of the notion that the combination of metacognitive strategies would achieve better results, and promoted them to know where they were going to do. Then, students were helped to first plan, arrange their learning at the beginning of the term, then check and revise the plans at mid-term. The effects of monitoring and evaluating were reinforced through self-evaluation, peer evaluation and teacher evaluation, which were used to assess the results of decisions made during a listening task, allowing students to evaluate their ongoing learning and take necessary remedial actions by reviewing difficulties, choose appropriate strategies to learn and seek various practice opportunities.Some statistical methods, such as Independent-Samples T Test and Paired-Samples T Test have been applied to process data obtained by SPSS 10.0. The study achieved encouraging results. Data from quantitative analyses suggested that (1) metacognitive training helped students improve their listening performance;(2) the training played a positive role in enhancing students' metacognitive awareness, the learners are more able to select strategies appropriate to solve particular problems.