An Experimental Study Of Cognitive And Metacognitive Strategies Training Related To English Listening Instructionfor Non-English Majors At Their Undergraduate Level

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four basic skills that a foreign language learner should master. Among the four skills, listening comprehension is very important so much so that it ranks first. This research is intended for how to improve the efficiency of foreign language listening comprehension teaching. Investigation shows that empirical studies on listening comprehension instruction, especially on listening comprehension strategies training for non-English majors at their undergraduate level, are worth further studying. Based on the summary and the analysis of theories of listening and language learning strategies, and the previous research results of listening learning strategy training both at home and abroad, this dissertation reports a tentative interventionist study of listening learning strategy training for non-English majors at their undergraduate level from the viewpoint of integrated training on both cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies. Quasi-experimental design is the main research method in this study.A cohort of 121 non-English major undergraduate students from three intact classes of Guangxi Normal University participated in the study. One class of 40 which received both cognitive and metacognitive strategies training comprised Experimental Group 1; another class of 42 receiving only cognitive strategies made up Experimental Group 2 and a third class of 39 served as Control Group, receiving normal listening instruction without strategy training. Based on a pre-training discussion over Oxford's SILL which identified the students'listening difficulties and their existing learning strategies, eight cognitive strategies and seven metacognitive strategies were selected for the training which lasted for one semester. The strategies are listed as follows: predicting, vocabulary, note-taking, imaginary, grammar, inferring, meaning seeking, visual-image strategy, planning, directed attention, selective attention, self-management, self-monitoring, self-evaluating, and self-regulation. A handbook of training material suitable for the listening comprehension strategies, a training model and a training process were then prepared by the researcher, which served as guidelines for the class teachers to conduct the instruction in normal classroom sessions. A posttest, a post-training questionnaire and participants'protocols were administered, and the results of the three groups were compared from quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The findings have shown that strategy training enables English learners to improve their listening performance and enhance their awareness of using the related strategy in their daily study. The training combining cognitive strategies with metacognitive strategies has better effect than the training conducted in a separate way and by this only cognitive strategies training is meant. To be concrete, Experimental Group 1 outperformed Control Group very significantly (p<0.01) in every part of the posttest for listening proficiency; at the same time, the scores of Experimental Group 1 in Part 3 and the total posttest were very significantly (p<0.01) higher than Experimental Group 2; and Experimental Group 2 did better significantly only in Part 1 than Control Group in the posttest. The main factor that caused the improved performance was the instruction on the strategies that influenced the participants'transaction of listening comprehension process. It was also discovered that listening strategy training enhanced the subjects'awareness of strategy use. The subjects in Experimental Group 1 exhibited higher frequency of using the cognitive and metacognitive strategy than Experimental Group 2 and Control Group, and Experimental Group 2 showed higher frequency of cognitive strategy use than Control Group. In regard to the use of the strategy types for listening comprehension, the case is quite the same with what stated above: Experimental Group 1 after training excelled Experimental Group 2 in using more of the types. Moreover, strategy training of the kind is contributive to strengthening the students'confidence in their ability to improve their listening comprehension. A great majority of subjects in the training has taken a positive attitude toward what is taught to them. The students of Experimental Group 2 believe that it is necessary for them to be taught how to choose and employ the appropriate learning strategies and that in relevance to listening comprehension in particular. Comparatively speaking, the strategy training in this experimental study has shown less obvious impact on the top students who have a very good start at listening comprehension than those slow students who have a poor start at it in terms of listening comprehension improvement, the felt-need of using the strategies to let them move forward and build up their confidence in catching-up. One point that must be mentioned here is that this research is oriented to remove the difficulties that most of the non-English majors are confronted with.The findings of this study suggest that listening learning strategy training has a facilitative effect on Chinese non-English major undergraduate students and that the training combining cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies can get better effects than the instruction only on cognitive strategies. It is believed from the study that listening learning strategies can be taught and learned.