On The Relationship Between Non-English Majors' Listening Comprehension And Metacognitive Strategies

With the development of English teaching and research, more and more people begin to realize the importance of listening in the four basic skills. How to develop students'listening skills becomes the topic about which scholars and English teachers are both concerned. Many researchers both at home and abroad hold that learning strategies are an efficient way to improve listening comprehension.Learning strategies are classified into three categories by O'Malley & Chamot (1985) based on the process of cognitive psychology: metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies. They consider metacognitive strategies as"higher executive skills that entail planning for, monitoring, or evaluating the success of a learning activity", and classify them into three main groups: planning strategies, monitoring strategies and evaluation strategies.After the summary and systematical analysis of the research results related to the theory of listening comprehension and metacognitve strategies, the author tries to explore the relationship between metacognitive strategies and listening comprehension by means of the empirical study in order to provide some references on how to help students make improvements in listening comprehension.This empirical study selects 57 students from College of Petroleum Engineering of China University of Petroleum as subjects , employs the instruments of test, questionnaire,"think-aloud"protocol and interview with focus on the two main questions (what are the differences of the metacognitive strategy application among different levels of listening comprehension ability, what are the reasons for the ineffective listeners'failure and in what way do the successful learners benefit from metacognitive listening strategies) to analyze the relationship between meatacognitive strategies and listening comprehension with the help of SPSS 14.0. After some qualitative and quantitative researches, it turns out that there is significant and positive correlation between listening comprehension ability and metacognitive strategy application, especially with monitoring strategy application; the higher proficiency level students are good at applying the metacognitive strategies to listening comprehension while ineffective listeners are poor at applying the metacognitve strategies to listening comprehension, therefore the inadequacy of metacognitive awareness and the insufficiency of metacognitive strategies are one important reason for the failure of the ineffective listeners.The empirical study concludes that promoting students'metacognitve awareness and enhancing the guidance of metacognitive strategies can help students improve their listening comprehension ability.