An Empirical Study Of Listening Teaching Based On Metacognitive Strategies For English Majors In A Higher Vocational College

Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is a higher-level one. It involves an ability of consciously using metacognitive knowledge to plan, monitor and evaluate the learning process. Flavell proposed the conception of metacognition in 1970's. Scholars home and abroad have researched the learning strategies for nearly 30 years. Lots of them have gained fruitful achievements. Metacognitive strategies play an important role in learning process, especially in listening learning and teaching process. More and more researchers have noticed that the relationship between metacognitive strategies and listening comprehension. However, most studies have been focused on university undergraduates, instead of students in higher vocational colleges (HVC).Based on related studies on listening comprehension as well as learning strategies home and abroad and the present situation of the English majors'listening comprehension in HVC, the author designed a 3-month metacognitive-strategies-based listening instruction program for 50 freshmen of the Foreign Language School, Hubei Polytechnic Institute. This program was designed to tackle three problems. The first is how to cultivate the students'metacognitive awareness through training. The second is whether the training has a positive effect on learners'listening comprehension and helps them to improve their awareness. The third is whether the metacognitive strategy training is a practical and effective way to apply to English listening teaching in HVC.The subjects have been divided into two groups:experimental one and control one. The experimental and the control groups were respectively taught by using different teaching method. The experimental group received metacognitvie strategy-based training for 3 months, while the control group followed the normal listening teaching mode without research interference. Both groups received two listening comprehension tests of PRETCO.A questionnaire is done to the experimental group at the beginning of this experiment, which is on the present situation of English majors'metacognition in HVC. Then, the author briefly introduced the knowledge and theory of metacognitive strategy. Next, in terms of the teaching practice the author designed the training of students' metacognitvie strategy to experimental group. The metacognitive strategy trained was planning, self-monitoring and self-evaluation. And each listening class of the training adopted an embedded Underwood's model, which processes listening into "pre-listening" "while-listening" and "post-listening". Last, the author made statistical analyses of the data by using SPSS17.0. Data were collected from two tests (pretest and posttest), a questionnaire and presentation. This study involves a comparative study between them and analyzes them from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The results show that the differences of the two groups are significant statistically.The findings suggest that students'listening comprehension can be significantly improved by metacognitvie strategy training. Second, the training of metacognitvie strategy can enrich the strategy knowledge of students, strengthen their awareness of using metacognitvie strategies, stimulate their learning interests and enhance their ability to learn independently. Third, applying the metacognitvie strategy to English listening teaching is a practical and effective method to improve the listening comprehension levels of students in HVC.