The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To Listening Teaching In Senior High Schools

Listening comprehension is an essential component of communication and a rather difficult language skill to acquire. It is a complex and an active process. Studies show that in one's daily life communication, approximately 9% of the time is devoted to writing, 16% to reading, 30% to speaking, and 45% to listening. However, in China as a foreign language learning skill, listening has been neglected for a long time. In fact, Listening is an important part of English teaching in senior high schools. It has been paid wide attention to since 2001, when listening was regarded as an important part of the National College Entrance Examination. However, the current situation of English listening teaching in senior high schools is not satisfactory. The traditional teacher-centered listening teaching has been playing a dominative role, which takes listening comprehension as a passive and receptive process and neglects the strategies that learners use to understand listening materials, to process information and to activate the prior knowledge etc. In recent years, studies on listening strategy training have become active, and many researchers try to improve learners' listening proficiency through listening strategy training. Therefore, the question of how to facilitate the development of learning strategies in listening needs to be studied.According to the findings of cognitive psychology, O' Malley and Chamot (1985) have differentiated learning strategies into three categories depending on the level or type of processing involved. They are metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, and social/affective strategies. Recent studies point to the potential role of metacognitive strategies for enhancing success in second language listening. They state that metacognitive strategies are higher order of executive skills that may entail planning for, monitoring, or evaluating the success of a learning activity. The few studies carried out in listening strategy instruction suggest that students can indeed be instructed in strategy use to enhance their performance on listening tasks. But in China, studies in this field are relatively rare. Less research has been done on the correlation between the application of metacognitive strategies and senior high student's listening proficiency.Thus, this thesis reports a tentative study for solving such a problem from the perspective of the metacognitive strategy-centered training. It adopts O'Malley and Chamot's classification, and then has established a metacognitive strategy-centered instructional mode, which is planning for listening,monitoring one's listening process, evaluating one's listening performance in a foreign language listening classroom. And the writer attempts to find the answer to the following questions:1. Can the application of metacognitive strategies raise Senior High students' metacognitive awareness in listening?2. Can the application of metacognitive strategies in listening comprehension improve Senior High students' listening proficiency?Eighty senior Grade Two students from two intact classes in Wudi No.1 Senior High School participated in the one-term study, with one class as experimental group receiving metacognitive strategy training in class and the other receiving normal listening instruction as the control group. Before the training, a listening comprehension pretest was conducted for the purpose of discovering if there are significant differences between the two groups. The results show there is no significant difference in their listening proficiency. And then a questionnaire of metacognitive strategies in listening was conducted among the students in experimental class to investigate students' current use of metacognitive strategies in listening comprehension. The survey shows that most of them didn't know how to use planning, monitoring and evaluation strategies, and how to adopt effective methods to improve their listening comprehension, not to mention making plans and taking measures to enhance their listening proficiency.After the one-term experiment, the study has achieved encouraging results. The data from the students' response to the questionnaire before and after the training show that students' metacognitive awareness has been greatly improved (planning increased by 57.73%, monitoring, 45.5% and evaluation, 34.74%). In addition, the comparison between the two groups' pre-test and post-test of listening comprehension scores shows that the experimental class has greatly outperformed the control class in listening proficiency after training. So we can say the incorporation training of metacognitive strategy training and English listening teaching has positive effects on stimulating students' motivation, increasing students' cognitive and metacognitive proficiency, optimizing learning styles, enhancing self-monitoring ability and improving students' achievements. It is hoed that the research is helpful to all the English teachers in senior high schools.