The Study On The Effect Of Metacognitive Strategies On English Majors' Listening Comprehension In Chinese Context

With the development of teaching theories and researches, all the people have realized the importance of listening in language learning. Due to the importance of listening among the basic foreign languages skills, how to improve the efficiency of foreign language listening teaching so as to improve college students' listening proficiency has long been a concern of researchers and foreign language teachers. This thesis reports a tentative study for solving such a problem from the viewpoint of the metacognitive strategy-centered training. It has combined the some theories related to foreign language listening comprehension, metacognitive theory and the research results of learning strategies to analyze; and then according to the current situation inside the nation or in abroad and the problems in listening comprehension, wants to establish a metacognitive strategy-centered instructional model in foreign language listening classroom, which means to improve listening teaching efficiency by promoting students' metacognitive awareness and instructing students to use metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies in foreign language listening classroom, so as to lead to the improvement in students' listening performance.In the past twenty years, many people had researched the metacognitive strategies, but they just combined them with the fields of mathematics, writing and reading, etc., few of them put the strategies into foreign language listening teaching. This study wants to inspect the effect of metacognitive strategies on English majors' listening comprehension by the empirical study. Based on that, the author made a comparison between two groups. Eighty English major students from two intact classes participated in the 12 weeks' study: one class of 40 which received metacognitive strategy-centered training comprised experimental group; the other class of 40 served as comparison group, receiving normal strategy instruction without metacognitive component. After the 12 weeks' training, data were obtained and analyzed through the performance of the listening tasks on a pre-and post-tests by the two groups to find out that only the experimental group students receiving the metacognitive strategies centered training have got the significant improvement in their listening proficiency.This shows that emphasizing the training of metacognition and the metacognitive strategies is the need and effective way to help students improve students' listening proficiency. The training of metacognitive strategies is helpful for students to form the value of language and systematic learning. The aim is to improve the English level of students and foster the competence and awareness of students' independent study.