A Correlation Study Of English Majors’ Metacognitive Awareness And Their Listening Proficiency Levels

Listening is a basic language skill which plays an important role instudents’ second language acquisition. In recent years, many domestic andforeign scholars have paid close attention to it. While exploring listeners’awareness and strategy processing, the researchers have gradually discoveredthe importance of listening metacognition.In the past twenty years, metacognition has become not only a vitalresearch topic for psychology, but also influenced second language education.Researchers at home and abroad have done a lot of empirical researches onmetacognitive strategy for second language listening. In2006, Vandergrift etal. developed a questionnaire for the measurement of metacognitiveawareness in second language listening (MALQ). Taking metacognitiveawareness in listening as a breakthrough point, through a period of training onmetacognitive awareness, this thesis explores the relationship betweenlearners’ metacognitive awareness and listening achievement, the MALQ isadopted to investigate learners’ level of metacognitive awareness in listening,so to find effective methods to improve students’ English listening level.However, research on listeners’ metacognitve awareness is still scant andmost of those studies so far have been conducted are under the circumstancesof non-English majors. Few studies on English majors’ listeningmetacognitive awareness are conducted in China, the subjects are oftennon-English majors, few studies have taken English majors as the researchsubjects, and few researches has tried to explore the differences in thelistening metacognitive awareness of learners with different listeningproficiency. So in light of the present insufficiencies and uncertainties, this study takes78English-major juniors as the participants to investigate theEnglish-major college students’ metacognitive awareness about listening andto explore the differences in metacognitive awareness between high-andlow-proficiency listeners in detail, attempting to provide guidance in thedevelopment of effective listening instruction.This study is mainly quantitative and complemented by qualitativedata．As for the quantitative data, the Metacognitive Awareness ListeningQuestionnaire (MALQ) is used to measure subjects’ metacogntive awarenessabout listening. The subjects’ TOEFL listening score is used to indicate theirlistening proficiency. Of the qualitative data, an semi-structured interviewwere employed to get access to learners’ metacognitive awareness aboutlistening．The contents and results of the interview serve as a supplement forthe quantitative research．All the quantitative data are analyzed with SPSS17.0.Descriptivestatistics and data collected from the interviews are used to describe thecurrent situation of students’ metacognitive awareness about listening；Pearson correlation analysis is used to explore the relationship betweenmetacognitive awareness and listening proficiency；and independent samples ttest is employed to probe into the differences in metacognitve awarenessbetween high and low level listeners.The research results are presented as follows：1) English major learners have a medium awareness level of themetacognitive knowledge in listening．They are aware of the three categoriesof metacognitive knowledge in a descending order by task, person andstrategy knowledge．2) Metacognitive knowledge is positively and significantly correlatedwith listening comprehension proficiency, but correlation coefficient is rather low.3) Metacognitive awareness difference between high and low proficiencylisteners is significant．The high-proficiency listeners show a higher degree ofmetacognitive awareness than low-proficiency listeners．...