Effects Of Metalinguistic Awareness And Oral Vocabulary On Chinese Children's English Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is a fundamental component of second language(L2)learning,yet little is known about the linguistic and cognitive skills contributing to Chinese children's English listening comprehension.The present study examined the effects of metalinguistic awareness(phonological awareness,morphological awareness and orthographic awareness)and oral vocabulary on Chinese children's listening comprehension.In total,103 EFL Chinese children from the fifth and sixth grade of a primary school participated in this study.Measures of English phonological awareness(phoneme deletion),morphological awareness(inflectional morphology,derivational morphology and compounding morphology),orthographic awareness,oral vocabulary and English listening comprehension were administered.Results from regression analyses and mediation tests indicated: 1)English inflectional morphology,phoneme deletion and compounding morphology significantly explained the variance of oral vocabulary;2)English oral vocabulary,compounding morphology,and orthographic awareness predicted Chinese children's listening comprehension;and 3)Moreover,the effects of compounding morphology and orthographic awareness on listening comprehension was partially mediated by oral vocabulary.This study opens up useful avenues for further research on model building and offers some implication for the teaching of L2 listening to Chinese children.