The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To Teaching College English Listening

O’Malley&Chamot divided the learning strategies into three categories: cognitive strategy, emotional/social strategy and metacognitive strategy. The metacognitive strategy has a higher standard than the other two. The meaning of the metacognitive strategy is that the students are conscious of using planning, monitoring and evaluating strategies which can reasonably adjust the learning task.In practical application, it proves that metacognitive strategies have a positive effect on language study. Lots of scholars abroad, like O’Malley&Chamot (1985), Wenden(1987), Nunan(1996) experimented the metacognitive strategies training, which proved the practicality. In China, Kangli Ji (2002),Jianding Yang (2003) and Yisong Lu (2005) also studied the relationship between the metacognitive training and the listening study. But both at home and abroad, in order to effectively and scientifically improve the students’ listening comprehension, the researches on how to apply metacognitive strategies to non-English majors’ listening learning still need further discussion.The creativity of this thesis is that I put metacognitive strategies into the non-English majors’listening class. The result of this training further proves the reliability of the previous researches on this topic. The previous experiments are almost for one semester, and the data are collected from one semester’s experiment. On the other hand, the experiment in this paper lasts for two semesters during college English teaching. The result is more believable and valuable. Besides, the experimental method in this thesis is not limited in one way. The author uses more than three ways to illustrate the importance of metacognitive strategies training.After literature review, according to the pre-test questionnaire, I investigated the effect of metacognitive strategies among125non-English majors of Tianjin Institute of Urban Construction and I also gave them a listening test. One class was considered as experimental class.(The Department of Applied Chemistry) and the other class was considered as control class.(The Department of Materials Chemistry) The experimental class was given the metacognitive strategies training while the control class was not given. After two semesters’ training, I gave them the same questionnaire and another listening test. From the pre-test and post-test, I could make a comparison between the two classes. On the other hand, the18students’interviews before strategies’ training and15students’ interviews after training as well as10students’ diaries which were collected after training in experimental class also gave many indications in this experiment. From the comparison and analysis, I could conclude that the metacogintive strategies training could improve students’ listening ability and could help the students increase their metacognitive awareness.