An Empirical Study Of Metacognitive Strategy Training In English Listening Teaching At Vocational College

As we know,many EFL learners in our country,especially students at vocational colleges do have a lot of difficulties in their English listening learning.There are two causes of this problem.One is that they are poor in listening,and the classroom time for listening teaching is rather insufficient.The other is that they seldom think about what weakness and problems lie in their listening learning,and most of them have no long-term self-study plans.They can not make good use of their after-class time to perform persistent listening practice by themselves.In fact,the two causes reflect that most of the EFL learners especially at vocational college lack the awareness of self-planning,self-monitoring and self-evaluating in their studies,i.e,they lack a kind of very important learning strategy—metacognitive strategy.Thus the author thinks that it is necessary for us to do something to help our EFL learners in this aspect. So in this study we conducted an experiment to integrate the metacognitive strategy training into listening teaching in the hope of cultivating the students' metacognitive awareness and learner autonomy to improve their listening learning effect.The researches on metacognitive strategies(first definitely advanced by the American psychologist J.H.Flavell)began about 30 years ago. However,in our country there are very few studies integrating the metacognitive strategy training into listening teaching or targeting the subjects of vocational college EFL learners.What's more,most of the studies in our country are mainly concerned cultivating EFL learners' metacognitive strategies in in-class learning instead of their after-class learning.Thus the present empirical study focuses on cultivating EFL learners' metacognitive strategies not only in their in-class learning but also in their after-class learning.The subjects of this study are from two Grade 2006 classes of Hunan Mass Media Vocational and Technical College.After some investigations of metacognitive strategy application and learner autonomy and a pre-test of the listening proficiency were carried out,20 students from each class were chosen to form the experimental group and control group respectively,based on the principle of condition-proximity.Meanwhile, the 20 students in the experimental group were sub-classified into successful listeners(10 students)and unsuccessful listeners(10 students) respectively according to the results of the listening pre-test.Both the experimental group and control group had the same teacher,the same teaching materials,and the same class time.The only difference was that the experimental group received metacognitive strategy training in listening class,but the control group did not.The training lasted a semester.Firstly,one period of metacognitive theory training was given to the experimental group.Then in-class and after-class metacognitive strategy training followed.The in-class training was performed in three steps:pre-listening,while-listening,and post-listening.In after-class training,the students in the experimental group were required to work out their self-directed learning plans,and to self-monitor and self-evaluate their after-class self-study by keeping diaries.After one semester' training, some investigations of metacognitive strategy application and learner autonomy and a post-test of the listening proficiency were conducted to both the experimental group and the control group to find out the training effect.The data in this study were transformed into SPSS 12.0 for further analysis.Based on the analyses of the results of the study,we can conclude that:1)metacognitive strategy training can significantly increase EFL learners' metacognitive awareness;2)metacognitive strategy training can greatly improve EFL learners' listening proficiency;3)metacognitive strategy training produces more obvious benefits on the unsuccessful listeners;4)metacognitive strategy training can facilitate cultivating the EFL learners' autonomy.Besides the introduction and the conclusion,this thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter One is a brief literature review of listening comprehension and metacognitive strategies.Chapter Two is a description of the experiment design and the procedure of the metacognitive strategy training experiment.Chapter Three is about data collection and analysis. Chapter Four is a discussion of the experiment results.