The Application Of Metacognitive Strategies To English Listening Teaching In Senior High Schools

Listening is one of the most important ways that people receive information in their daily life,and it plays a large part in many examinations.However,listening has been a weak point for many high school students.Therefore,what strategy can be used to improve the listening levels of high school students is widely concerned by scholars at home and abroad.Metacognitive strategies,as one of the learning strategies,have been proven to be beneficial to students’ second language learning by many domestic and foreign scholars.Therefore,this paper firstly reviews and summarizes the development and research results of metacognition,metacognitive strategies and listening comprehension theories at home and abroad,and then uses O’Malley & Chamot’s metacognitive strategies classification as the basis to conduct metacognitive teaching training of high school English listening from three aspects: planning strategy monitoring strategy and evaluation strategy,so as to prove the effectiveness of metacognitive strategies in high school English listening teaching.102 senior one students from the High School Affiliated to Qinghai Normal University in Xining city participated in this study.Among them,50 were in the experimental class,and 52 were in the control class.The experimental class received listening teaching based on metacognitive strategies training for three months,while the control class still received listening teaching in the traditional way.This study explored the following three main questions through questionnaires and two listening tests of similar difficulty as well as face-to-face interviews.1)Which metacognitive strategies are most frequently used by high school students in their English listening learning?2)What is the effect of metacognitive strategies training on the listening proficiency levels of high school students?3)What are the differences in the effects of metacognitive strategies training on students with advanced,intermediate,and elementary listening levels?The results of the study showed that of these three metacognitive strategies,high school students used the monitoring strategy most frequently during listening.However,there are many problems with the use of metacognitive strategies among high school students,such as they are not able to allocate time scientifically and solve difficulties in the right way during the listening process,and they are not able to reflect on the use of metacognitive strategies consciously after the listening process.In addition,after three months of training in metacognitive strategies,the experimental class showed a significant increase in performance compared to the control class.This indicates that the application of metacognitive strategies in high school English listening teaching helps high school students to improve their English listening levels.In addition,by comparing the pre-test and post-test scores of students at different levels in the experimental class and combining the interview results,this study found that the elementary-level students have the greatest effect in improving their listening levels after the training,followed by the intermediate-level,and finally the advanced-level.Based on these findings,this study concludes that the application of metacognitive strategies in high school English listening teaching can improve high school students’ English listening levels and that students of different learning levels are influenced differently.This provides useful insights into the search for a new model of teaching English listening in high school.However,due to the small sample size,this study has limitations and needs to be supplemented by subsequent research.