A Correlational Study Between Chinese Efl Learners' Metacognitive Awareness And Listening Comprehension

Listening plays a very important role in second language acquisition and language teaching and much effort has been made to improve learners'listening ability. However, the status quo of Chinese college students'English listening is far from satisfactory. How to improve listening ability effectively becomes the top concern of both EFL teachers and students.Researchers like Goh and Graham propose to consider listening comprehension from the learner's point of view. However, research on listeners'metacognitve awareness is still scant and most of those studies so far have been conducted in contexts of English-spoken area and surrounding like Singapore other than China. Of the few studies conducted in China, the subjects are often college students studying English as their major, few studies have taken non-major college students as the research subjects, and no research has tried to explore the differences in the listening metacognitive awareness of learners with different listening proficiency. So in light of the present insufficiencies and uncertainties, this study takes 228 non-English-major sophomores as the participants to investigate the non-English-major college students'metacognitive awareness about listening and to explore the differences in metacognitive awareness between high-and low-proficiency listeners in detail, attempting to provide guidance in the development of effective listening instruction.The present study is mainly quantitative in nature, and complemented by qualitative data. Of the quantitative data, the Metacognitive Awareness of Listening comprehension Questionnaire was used to measure participants'metacogntive awareness about listening. Participants'CET-4 listening score was used to indicate their listening comprehension proficiency. Of the qualitative data, listening diary and semi-structure interview were employed to get access to learners'metacognitive awareness about listening. The contents and results of listening diaries and interview serve as the supplement for the quantitative research.All the quantitative data were analyzed with SPSS 13.0. Descriptive statistics and data collected from listening diaries and interviews were used to describe the current situation of students'metacognitive awareness about listening; Pearson correlation analysis was used to explore the relationship between metacognitive awareness and listening proficiency; and independent samples t test was employed to probe the differences in metacognitve awareness between high-and low-ability listeners.The research results are presented as follows:1) Chinese college learners indicate a medium awareness level of the metacognitive knowledge in listening. They are aware of the three categories of metacognitive knowledge in a descending order by task, person and strategy knowledge.2) Metacognitive knowledge is positively and significantly correlated with listening comprehension proficiency, but correlation coefficient is rather low.3) Metacognitive awareness difference between high- and low- proficiency listeners is significant. The high-proficiency listeners show a higher degree of metacognitive awareness than low-proficiency listeners.