| Among the four basic language skills of listening,speaking,reading and writing,listening as the basis of the other three skills plays an important role in foreign language teaching,because enhancing the listening ability has a positive impact on improving learners’ overall language proficiency.Therefore,more and more domestic and foreign scholars begin to investigate learning strategies that can improve learners’ listening proficiency.Among them,metacognitive strategies are considered to be a kind of important strategy that greatly affects the success of listening.O’Malley and Chamot(1990)firstly study the role of metacognitive strategies in foreign language listening comprehension.Since then,studies on foreign language listening based on metacognitive theory have emerged at home and abroad.Based on metacognitive theory,Vandergrift et al.(2006)designed a set of questionnaire(Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire,short for MALQ)after repeated testing and modification in plenty of tests.In virtue of this questionnaire,Vandergrift&Tafaghodtari(2010)explored the role of metacognitive process-based approach in improving the listening proficiency of students of French as a second language(FSL).On the basis of the research,this study attempts to further explore the metacognitive awareness and listening comprehension development of college English majors in Chinese EFL environment.Furthermore,this study integrates the multimodal learning proposed by Gu Yueguo(2007)with metacognitive process-based approach to investigate the effect of multimodal metacognitive strategy instruction on listening comprehension and tends to answer the following three questions:1.What is the current state of Chinese college English majors’ metacognitive awareness in the process of listening comprehension?2.What are the effects of integrating multimodal teaching with metacognitive strategy instruction in listening comprehension teaching?3.What are the individual differences on metacognitive awareness and L2 listening proficiency development between More-skilled and Less-skilled Listeners?In order to answer the three questions,the author conducted a 16-week listening teaching experiment based on multimodal metacognitive strategy instruction on 120 English majors drawn from four intact classes of Qingchuan College in Wuhan.Among the four classes,60 students from class2 and class3 formed the experimental group,and 60 students from class 4 and class 5 formed the control group.Independent-Samples T Test of the pretest results showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups on English listening proficiency.In addition,the two groups were taught by the same teacher and used the same listening material,while the only difference was the teaching mode.The students in the experimental group received multimodal metacognitive instruction while those in the control group were taught in a traditional way mainly through playing the recording and checking the answers.Descriptive statistical analysis of the MALQ test results before the experiment indicates that the overall metacognitive awareness of Chinese college English majors was at a lower-intermediate level.Among the five factors in MALQ,there was significant difference between the more-skilled and less-skilled students in their metacognitive awareness of planning&evaluation,mental translation and person knowledge,but the difference of directed attention and problem-solving was not statistically significant.Through Independent-samples T test and the Paired-samples T test of the pre-and post-test scores of the two groups,it was found that multimodal metacognitive strategy instruction was more conducive to listening comprehension than the traditional teaching mode;by comparing the differences in metacognitive awareness and listening proficiency development between the more-skilled and less-skilled listeners in the experimental group,it was found that multimodal metacognitive strategy instruction was more beneficial to the less-skilled listeners’ metacognitive awareness and listening proficiency development.In light of these findings,it is believed that integrating multimodal learning with metacognitive strategy instruction in the process of FL listening teaching can enhance learners’ metacognitive awareness and listening proficiency.Moreover,it is necessary for teachers to pay attention to the individual differences of learners in teaching design so as to give full play to the advantages of multimodal learning and metacognitive strategy instruction. |
