| Listening, as an input skill, is a basis of developing other language skills and plays a very important role in language learning. However, listening comprehension is not highlighted and even ignored by teachers and students in Mongolian senior high school. Since English listening test scores are not included in the college entrance examination scores in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, it becomes a general phenomenon that listening teaching and training is almost ignored by teachers and students. Therefore, for Mongolian students who are short of listening input, listening is the most difficult skill to master. Moreover, low-level listening ability is severely affecting their development of overall foreign language proficiency. Therefore, it has become an extremely urgent task for teachers to help students enhance their English listening achievement and to teach listening in a more effective way.Listening is influenced by many factors, among which metacognitive awareness is one of the important factors. Vandergrift(2006) defines metacognitive awareness as metacognitive knowledge of learners’ awareness about themselves, their understanding of listening demands, their cognitive goals and their approach to the task and their strategies. Many researchers think that learners who have metacognitive awareness use more strategies and do better in learning task than those who don’t have metacognitive awareness. In recent years, a large number of researchers and scholars at home explore the relationship between listening metacognitive awareness and listening achievement from different perspectives based on metacognition theory, and put forward some useful measures about listening teaching. But, these studies mainly take English major or non-English major university students and college students who study in Chinese as their research subjects; by contrast, there are few researches about senior high school students, especially Mongolian senior high school students.Therefore, 130 Mongolian senior high school students are taken as the research subjects. Quantitative research method is used in this study by collecting data from one questionnaire and one English listening test. Three questions are proposed:1) What is the current situation of Mongolian senior high school students’ metacognitive awareness of listening?2) Whether Mongolian senior high school students’ metacognitive awareness of listening and their listening comprehension achievement are correlated?3) What are the differences between high-score and low-score listeners in regard to their listening metacognitive awareness?SPSS 17.0 is employed to analyze the data in this study. Descriptive statistics is used for question 1; Pearson correlation analysis for question 2; Independent T-test for question 3. According to the data, major findings are summarized as follows:1) Mongolian senior high school students’ metacognitive awareness of listening is at a medium level in general. Among the five subcategories, students have highest awareness of directed attention, followed by problem-solving, person knowledge, planning and evaluation, and mental translation which is the lowest awareness.2) There is a significant positive correlation between Mongolian senior high school students’ metacognitive awareness and their listening achievement. Among the five subcategories of metacognitive awareness, directed attention, problem-solving, planning & evaluation and person knowledge are positively correlated with listening achievement, while mental translation is negatively correlated with listening performance.3) The difference between high-score and low-score students in metacognitive awareness of listening in general is significant and high-score students show a higher degree of metacognitive awareness in listening process than low-score students.On the basis of the above results, some pedagogical suggestions for English listening teaching are put forward for Mongolian senior high school English teachers. |
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