A Study On Metacognitive Strategy-Based Instruction On College English Listening For Non-English Majors

Listening is the primary means of EFL acquisition for most people. The development of listening as a skill and as a bridge for language input should assume critical importance in instruction. However, listening is often overlooked in language pedagogy and research, especially, instruction in listening has not been received much attention until recently.With the study of learning strategies being on the rise, the area of strategy training for foreign language learners has become active recently. The point of integrating strategy instruction with language teaching is not to "accomplish" as many strategies as possible, but rather to focus the learners' attention on particular learning tasks, for example, listening. Learners can employ strategies to help them overcome obstacles in language use or language learning.The study researched the integration of metacognitive strategies with listening of EFL non-English majors. The primary objective of the study is to find whether instruction on the use of metacognitive strategies would result in improved listening comprehension. A metacognitive-based instruction model was conducted in the listening class in order to activate learners' metacognitive processing of planning, monitoring, evaluating and compensating with the purpose of enhancing achievement in their listening comprehension and promoting strategy use and metacognitive awareness.Ninety-two freshmen of non-English majors from two pre-band II classes participated in the study: the experimental class received metacognitive strategy-based instructional model, while the other class served as the control class, receiving listening instruction without metacognitive strategy training. A questionnaire of strategies of 28 items was composed of four categories of planning, monitoring, evaluating and compensating.Data were obtained and analyzed through the results of pre-test and post-test of two classes. Results revealed that the subjects' in EC outperformed students in CC in terms of the percentage of students who showed improvement. This indicated that the metacognitive strategy instruction exerted some effect on average listeners. There also emerged an increase in use of metacognitive strategies after the training, and monitoring strategy showed the greatest increase. The students' oral reports indicated that students' metacognitive awareness of listening processes has been promoted, too.The pedagogic implication for listening is as follows: first, planning strategy exerted more influence on students' time commitment, and then students devoted more time to their established plan; secondly, monitoring strategy can enhance students' attention during listening activities and cause them to employ more strategies.The limitation of the study lies in a short period of training for the students and difficulty in communication due to students being from different classes in multi-level teaching.