An Empirical Study On Metacognitive Strategy Training In College English Listening Instruction

Listening is not only a skill area in language performance, but also a critical means of EFL acquisition. In China, its importance is also recognized and consolidated in the form of both curriculum design and testing. However, how to develop learners' English listening ability remains an arduous task for English teachers and researchers.Over the past twenty years research on metacognitive strategies has been on the rise, and a new approach - the metacognitive approach has also been proposed by scholars abroad to facilitate L2 listening development. However, in China a little research has been done to probe into the effects of metacognitive strategy training on English listening. Therefore, the author of this thesis has carried out an empirical study, attempting to explore a new perspective from which college English listening can be taught.The thesis reports a study of listening metacognitive strategy training on non-English majors at Century College of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and discusses its implication in College English listening instruction. A pre- and post-testing of listening comprehension and a questionnaire on listening metacognitive strategy use were employed as main instruments and 88 students from two authentic classes took part in the experiment.The present study first probed into the overall situation of listening metacognitive strategies used by EFL first-year non-English majors. Through data analysis, the following have been obtained. (1) The frequency of metacognitive strategy use in the questionnaire is medium. (2) The frequencies of metacognitive strategy use from high to low are: self-monitoring, self-planning and self-evaluation.During the experimental phase, first a framework of listening metacognitive strategy training was developed, and then it was implemented in Experimental Class for over a 16-week period of time, while Control Class received the listening instruction without metacognitive strategy training. The whole experiment focused on the following three research questions: (1) what effect does this metacognitive strategy training have on students' listening metacognitive strategy use? (2)Whether this metacognitive strategy training will improve students' actual listening comprehension? (3) Which group of students benefit the most from this listening metacognitive strategy training, low-level, intermediate-level or high-level students?Through SPSS, the results proved the feasibility and effectiveness of the metacognitive strategy training in improving this specific group of students' listening comprehension. As regards to the first and the third research questions, the major findings can be summarized as follows: (1) this metacognitive strategy training does improve this specific group of students' use frequency of metacognitive strategies in listening as well as their listening metacognitive awareness; (2) this metacognitive strategy training has significantly improved this specific group of students' use frequency of self-planning and self-evaluation; (3) as for the specific metacognitive strategies self-planning and self-evaluation, the use frequency of students from low level has increased the most, while in self-monitoring, the use frequency of students from intermediate level has been improved the most after this training.Then, tentative discussions about the results, limitations and implications were put forward; furthermore, suggestions for future research in EFL listening metacognitive strategy instruction were presented.