| In recent years, metacognitive strategy, as an effective learning strategy, has been paid much attention by many researchers. As approved by many researches, metacognitive strategy which is a higher executive strategy plays a positive role in language learning. Listening comprehension is an important part among people's language skills and it also is an active and complex cognitive activity, in which listeners should employ some listening strategies to help their listening comprehension. Therefore, how to improve listeners' listening ability has been the main concern for many researchers and language teachers for many years. But most researches only focused on the relationship between language study and metacognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies are proved to be helpful to language learning. However, it still needs further study and research as for how to improve learners'metacognitive strategies to help improve learners'listening proficiency. The purpose of the study is to promote the learners'listening proficiency through metacognitive strategy training.The following questions are mainly researched and discussed.(1) Can metacognitive strategies training help improve learners'listening comprehension?(2) What are the differences between successful and unsuccessful listeners in the use of metacognitive strategies?(3) Can listeners'metacognitive awareness be improved after training?According to O'Malley and Chamot (1990)'s classification of metacognitive strategies, the metacognitive strategies training would mainly focus on the strategies of planning, monitoring and evaluation. The metacognitive strategies training was divided into four stages, namely, preparation stage, presentation stage, practice stage and evaluation stage. The study adopted both quantitative and qualitative analysis, and conducted two tests (pretest and posttest), two questionnaires (before the training and after the training) and interviews. The subjects came from two intact classes in Economy Department, College of Arts and Science at Jianghan University, which consisted of 70 students with 35 from the experimental class and 36 from the control class respectively. The author would conduct metacognitive strategy training in experimental class for one semester, while the control class would have their scheduled listening courses. After the training, the data was collected and analyzed.After one semester's metacognitive strategies training, the experimental class had greater improvement than the control class did in their posttest, which indicated that learners'listening proficiency could be improved through metacognitive strategies training. In addition, the results of the two questionnaires indicated that the metacognitive awareness of the experimental class students was significantly higher than that of the control class students after the training, which proved that students' metacognitive awareness can be trained. At the same time, the study also found out the competent listeners and the less competent listeners have great difference in the pattern and proficiency of their application of metacognitive strategies. In a word, the competent listeners employ the metacognitive strategies more successfully that the less competent listeners do. Further more, implications and limitations of the study are discussed. Hopefully, it will be conducive to current English as Foreign Language Teaching (EFLT) research and practice.This paper is composed of five chapters.Chapter one is the introduction part, which introduces the research orientation, purpose and significance of the study, and the composition of the study.Chapter two is literature review which presents the theoretical framework on metacognitive strategies and listening comprehension.Chapter three introduces the research design in detail. It includes research questions, subjects, instruments, data collection and training procedures.Chapter four is about the research results and answers of the research questionsChapter five presents the findings of the research questions. It also talks about the implications for listening teaching and suggestions for future metacognitive researches as well as the limitations of this study. |
