| Of all the language skills, listening plays a critical role in language learning. Theoretically, it is commonly accepted that there is a close correlation between metacognitive strategies and language learning proficiency and metacognitive strategies can be learned and correspondingly impact language learning competence through training. However, there were few studies which were conducted on metacognitive-strategy-based listening instruction in authentic teaching, especially, on the students' listening comprehension in technical and vocational colleges.73 English major students from Minbei vocational and technical college participated in the study. 37 of them receiving metacognitive-strategy-based instruction for three months formed the experimental group while the other 36 served as the control group, following the scheduled listening syllabus. Data were obtained from questionnaires, pretests and posttests about metacognitive strategies in English listening and students listening competence. After experiment, the researcher analyzed the probability of such instruction in vocational and technical college after dealing with the experimental data by SPSS 14.0.The results suggested that listeners' listening comprehension could be significantly facilitated through metacognitive strategy training, since the experimental group outperformed the control group statistically. Second, all the listeners' metacognitive awareness was significantly improved after the training. Third, some differences were found between competent and less competent listeners, in which the competent listeners outperformed less competent listeners based on the frequency that they employed the metacognitive strategies; Fourth, with respect to the degree of improvement, the data suggested that it was the less competent listeners that made significant improvement, which proved that metacognitive strategies training has greater potentialities for less competent listeners.
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