The Relationship Between High School Students’ English Listening Meta-cognitive Awareness And Listening Comprehension Levels

Listening is a fundamental part of language learning and an important component of second language acquisition.Nowadays,the new high school English curriculum has undergone a comprehensive reform,which has placed higher demands on the teaching of listening in English.Therefore,it has become an urgent task to improve learners’ overall English proficiency.As the researches on second/foreign language listening continue to progress,researchers have gradually discovered the importance of meta-cognition in the listening process.Domestic and foreign researches study on meta-cognitive awareness in listening have mainly focused on college students in vocational colleges or non-English majors and English majors undergraduates,while there is a relative lack of research on other levels of English learners such as high school and junior high school students.Therefore,in order to further understand the role of listening meta-cognitive awareness in listening comprehension of high school students and to explore the specific process of listening comprehension of high school students,this study was conducted with 153 students in the first,second and third grades of Xi’an Foreign Language School.Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,this research investigated the current situation of high school students’ English listening meta-cognitive awareness through a five-level scale questionnaire,a listening test questionnaire and semi-structured interviews,and further explored the relationship between high school students’ meta-cognitive awareness and their listening performance.In this study,the data were statistically analyzed by descriptive statistics,one-dimensional linear regression,and multiple linear regression in SPSS 26.0software,and the following conclusions were drawn from the interview results:1.High school students’ English listening meta-cognitive awareness and their five sub-consciousnesses were at an intermediate level.2.There was an extremely strong positive correlation between high school students’ English listening meta-cognitive awareness and listening comprehension level,and high school students’ English listening meta-cognitive awareness could explain 77% of the variation in their listening comprehension levels.3.There were extremely strong positive correlations between high school students’ planning/evaluation,problem solving,directed attention and listening comprehension levels.There was a strong positive correlation between high school students’ person knowledge and listening comprehension levels.There was a strong negative correlation between mental translation and listening comprehension level.In addition,problem solving,directed attention,mental translation,and person knowledge had predictive effects on learners’ listening comprehension levels.In contrast,planning and evaluation were not significant predictors of learners’ listening comprehension levels.Taking Xi’an Foreign Language School as an example,this study investigated the current situation of high school students’ English listening meta-cognitive awareness and explored the relationship between high school students’ English listening meta-cognitive awareness and listening comprehension level,which can provide useful insights for improving the quality of high school English listening teaching.