An Empirical Research On Improving College Students' English Listening Through Heightening Metacognitive Awareness And Utilizing Metacognitive Strategies

The article is meant to help the students improve their listening achievement through heightening their metacognitive awareness and using specific learning strategies in the process of listening, the reason is that with the development of the modern educational materials, the English teaching is changing all along. College English teaching model as a new course designed for non-English major students plays an important role in the teaching of English listening. However, the model of listening teaching is often characterized by playing the tape and checking answers with students. There are so many shortcomings in the teaching model that it is disadvantageous to cultivate the students'listening ability. And the aim of the study is to bring the change of English listening teaching and its teaching methods into realization. As a matter of fact, it would cause a stir among the teachers and college students. In the meantime English learning is becoming a popular field where the educational materials widely are used.Since 1970s, many language researchers in china and abroad have given the concept of learning strategies from different angles such as information processing theory, the relation of strategies and language materials, the aim of using strategies, the relation of strategies with learning process, and so on. O'Malley & Chamot (1990) thought learning strategies are the special thoughts or behaviors that individuals use to help them comprehend, learn, or retain new information. Oxford (1992) believed that learning strategies are adopted actions, act procedures and methods to improve second language skills which can stimulate the internalization, storage, correction and utilization and so on of a new language. O'Malley & Chamot (1990) classified learning strategies as metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies on the basis of information processing theory according to Anderson's cognitive theoretical framework. This classification derived from the experimental study and it is more comprehensive and representative compared with other methods of classification. According to the way of classification, many researchers concluded lots of effective teaching methods under the support of experimental study and eventually promoted the development of English listening teaching.The autonomous English learning has been developing fast in the past decades. The training of independent learner is the ultimate goal of the current education. However, the prior studies only focused on the autonomous learning strategies or the students'metacognitive strategies though having received some achievement. Little has been reported about the combination of the metacognitive strategies and teaching, especially in listening. The study is performed to help the students develop their autonomous learning ability in listening in two aspects: Heightening the students'awareness of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive strategies, and enhancing them constantly; emphasizing microstrategies to the students and instructed them to use in the process of learning to help to deal with the problems they might encounter in the process of listening.The writer conducted an experimental study on the basis of theory learning and this study reports a one-semester teaching which aims at heightening the students'metacognitive strategies and strategy use in the process of listening. The instruction program was conducted to 30 non-English major sophomores at Jilin Institute of Chemical Technology in attempt to cultivate learner autonomy and to encourage students to manage their own studies. The researcher laid a stress on metacognitive strategy training and language skills training so that the students are facilitated to change the attitude towards listening and learn autonomously.Two natural classes with the total number of 62 non-English major students in Jilin Institute of Chemical Technology were extracted as participants in the study. One of the two natural classes is set to be the experimental group, and the other is the comparison group. A pre-course and a post-course questionnaires about the strategies students use are given to the students and the teacher will then have interviews with individual students to make clear that how listening strategies are used and what strategies they often use. The multiple choices in the questionnaire were designed by adopting Likert's five-grade marking system and the choice content is determined by specific questions. In addition, two listening comprehension tests will be given to the students before and after the experiment separately. 30 subjects in the experimental group will receive metacognitive strategies and listening skills training. 32 subjects in the control group received only a traditional teaching in listening. The teacher in the class will address to them metacognitive strategies and listening skills but not emphasize the specific use of the strategies. At the end of this term the listening scores of the two groups are compared and analyzed to prove the hypothesis: heightening the students'metacognitive awareness and emphasizing listening skills will help foster the students'autonomous listening ability.The findings shows that the most frequently used learning strategies sequentially ranked are cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies and social/effective strategies. Moreover, the three types of learning strategies are significantly correlated to English listening achievement. The finding is identical with the results of previous studies and confirms the hypothesis of the present research. Data from both quantitative and qualitative analyses suggested that heightening the students'awareness of metacognition and using microstrategies play very important roles in the development of their autonomous listening ability.