Metacognitive Strategy Training In English Listening Course Of Higher Vocational College

Listening is the primary means of language input and it is viewed as the foundation of the other language skills. Listening comprehension is anything but a passive activity, it is a complex and active process, in which a great deal of mental activities is involved. And in this process, listeners always use some strategies to help his understanding. But the current situation of English listening teaching in Higher Vocational Colleges is not satisfactory. The traditional teacher-centered listening teaching has been playing a dominative role, which takes listening comprehension as a passive and receptive process and neglects the strategies that learners use to understand listening materials, to process information and to activate the prior knowledge etc. As listening-comprehension is now generally recognized to play a key role in facilitating language learning, it deserves analysis and support. Studies on listening strategy training have become active, and many researches try to improve learner's listening proficiency through listening strategy training. Therefore, the question of how to facilitate the development of learning strategies in listening needs to be studied.In recent years, many researchers have been attracted to the research of metacognitive strategy. Regarded as a higher-order executive skill, it involves the ability to consciously use metacognitive knowledge to plan, monitor and evaluate the learning process. So far, research on learning strategies has pointed to the powerful role of metacognition in language learning and the potential for greater use of metacognitive strategy in the learning process. However, little has been reported about metacognitive strategy training, especially in listening. Besides, the current relevant researches are mainly concerned with the four-year university students; few have explored metacognitive strategies in the field of higher vocational education. The higher vocational education is quite different from any of the other higher education in China, and the students of the higher vocational college have their own characteristics completely different from those in the common universities in the learning process. Therefore, it is of great need to carry out the research of metacognitive strategy training in English listening teaching of higher vocational college.Through analyzing the metacognitive theory, metacognitive strategies and their function in the English study, the thesis proposed a Metacognition-centered teaching model in English listening course, which means to improve students'ability of listening comprehension and cultivate students'metacognitive capability by instructing students to use plan strategy, monitoring strategy and appraisal strategy. The sample came from two intact classes in the Foreign Language Department of Shandong Agricultural Administrators'College, which were composed of 93 students with 46 in the experimental class and 47 in the control class. The experimental class received metacognitive strategy-based training for 13 weeks, while the control class followed the scheduled listening syllabus. The training adopted an integrated-direct mode which combined the strategy training into routine scheduled listening tasks and the students were explicitly informed the strategies they would be trained in terms of their significance and characteristics. The study method was both quantitative and qualitative, in which data was collected from listening tests, questionnaires and self-reports. The study was mainly conducted to research: the effects of metacognitive strategy training on English listening comprehension; the differences between competent listener and less competent listener in their improvement in listening comprehension after training and the improvement of students'metacognitive awareness after training.The finding of the study suggested that listener's listening comprehension could be significantly facilitated through metacognitive strategy training. Second, the competent listener made significant improvement, which proved that metacognitive strategy training has great potentialities for competent listener. Third, the students'metacognitive awareness was significantly improved after the training. So we may conclude that the incorporation training of metacognitive strategy training and English listening teaching has positive effects on increasing students'metacognitive proficiency, optimizing learning styles, enhancing self-monitoring ability and improving students'achievements. For higher vocational colleges, there is a limited language environment and have insufficient teaching hours and many students of these colleges had lower proficiency in English. So this research is instructive to the English listening teaching of higher vocational colleges.