Metacognitive Strategies Training In College English Listening Instruction

Metacognitive strategy is a kind of learning strategies. Among all the learning strategies,metacognitive strategy is a higher-order executive skill which contains using metacognitiveknowledge to plan, monitor and evaluate the learning process. Once having a good control ofmetacognitive strategies students can plan, select suitable strategies, monitor or evaluate theeffectiveness of strategies use and adjust the plan when necessary.With the intensifying research of learning strategies, greater importance is being attachedto the use of metacognitive strategies. However, little has been reported about metacognitivestrategies training in listening instruction.This research reports a14-week long metacognitive strategy training in the listeninginstruction to110non-English major freshmen from Shijiazhuang University. One class is theexperimental group,56students, which received metacognitive strategy instructional model;another class of54served as the control group, receiving regular strategy instruction withoutmetacognitive strategies. The research aims to investigate the relationship betweenmetacognitive strategy training and students’ listening comprehension. Before and after thetraining, a questionnaire concerning listeners’ metacognitive awareness was conducted to all thesubjects from the experimental group. And all the subjects from both experimental group andcontrol group were administrated a listening test twice (Pre-Test and Post-Test). After thetraining was finished，all the data were coded into computer and analyzed with the help of“SPSS.11.5”.This program was designed to deal with three questions. The first is whether themetacognitive strategy training effectively increases students’ metacognitive awareness. Thesecond is whether the metacognitive strategy training has a positive effect on the improvementof students’ listening comprehension. The third is whether there is difference in listeningcomprehension between the successful listeners and the unsuccessful listeners of theexperimental group. Data from the analyses assumed that: there is a correlation betweenmetacognitive strategies application and listening achievements. The results of the wholeexperiment indicate that listeners’ listening comprehension could be improved through themetacognitive strategies training. All the listeners’ metacognitive awareness is obviously improved after the training. Some differences were found between successful and unsuccessfullisteners. The successful listeners use metacognitive strategies more frequently than the unsuccessfullisteners. However concerning the degree of improvement, the data suggested that it was theunsuccessful listeners that made significant improvement.The results of the whole experiment show that the English listening ability of the twogroups has significant differences after the experiment. This result proves that the metacognitivestrategy training is more effective in improving the listening ability of the non-English majorsthan the regular strategy instruction. So we can draw the conclusion that putting metacognitiveelements into listening instruction is positive to improve students’ listening levels and also it isan effective way to promote listening proficiency..