A Study On The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Listening Teaching In Junior High School

Listening is considered as one of the most important basic skills among the four language skills. It is reported that listening takes up 45% of the time in human’s daily communication. However, teachers do not pay enough attention on listening teaching in junior English class. And most of teachers take students as passive receivers of the information in today’s listening class. Metacognition is a conception that includes learner’s knowledge of the cognitive process, the active monitoring, and coordination of the cognitive process. The study on metacognitive strategies in listening was firstly given by Thompson & Rubin. Since then there are many researchers study this topic. Nonetheless, the research participants are mainly senior high school students and adult students, which include college student and vocational school students. There are few researches explore the applying of metacognitive strategies to listening comprehension in junior high schools. Since the listening assessment of the examination has changed, the study aims to apply metacognitive strategies to junior high school and it is going to discuss two questions:First, what is the current situation of using metacognitive strategies in listening for junior high school students? And what are the changes of using metacognitive strategies in three dimensions(planning strategies, monitoring strategies and evaluating strategies) after the experiment respectively?Second, can metacognitive strategy training improve students’ listening scores in junior high schools? If so, which level(s) of students(high-level, medium-level or low-level) can benefit more from the metacognitive strategy training?The study participants in this study were 89 students, who came from Grade Three in NO. 46 Junior High School. There are 44 students in EC, and 45 students in CC. During the research procedure, students in EC were taught English listening by metacognitve strategy training, while students in CC involved in traditional method to improve their listening skills by listening more and correcting the errors. The author designed the experiment period as 16 weeks and the research instruments were questionnaires, listening tests, and interview to gather the data, which were analyzed by using SPSS software. Here are the research results:First, students sometimes use metacognitive strategies before the experiment, but not frequently. Planning strategies and monitoring strategies belong to medium-level, but evaluating strategies belong to low-level. The using frequency from the most to the least are monitoring strategies, planning strategies and evaluating strategies. After the training, students’ awareness of using metacognitive strategies has been enhanced. Planning strategies and evaluating strategies belong to medium-level, and monitoring strategies reach high-level. What is more, there are obvious differences in planning strategies and evaluating strategies. The result is different from that of monitoring strategies, though the mean increased as well.Second, the metacognitive strategy training can largely improve their listening scores. Besides students in low-score group and middle-score group improve more than those in high-score group.In conclusion, the study results implicate that the instruction of metacognitive strategies can improve both students’ awareness of applying the strategies and their listening scores at last. Besides, the training of evaluating strategies plays an indispensable role in improving students’ listening competence.