A Study On The Relation Among Listening Metacognition, English Anxiety And English Listening Proficiency Of Vocational College Students

Listening is the vital means of classroom instruction as well as an essential communicative skill at work. With the improvement in listening ability, more input will be received, which will facilitate language acquisition. Since learner-centered approach becomes the tendency, many learner variables which can sharply affect learning process widely arouse the researchers'attention. The affective factor and metacognitive factor, as implicitly influential factors in listening process, are researched by more and more researchers recently.In the recent years, many researchers research into metacognition theory and anxiety theory respectively. But little attention has been put into the counteraction between them. Much research had been done in the relation between metacognition and English listening and the relation between anxiety and English listening. However, studies concerning the relation among anxiety, metacognition and English listening are rare. This paper aims to find efficient ways for improving vocational college students' listening proficiency by studying the relation among listening metacognition, English anxiety and English listening proficiency.The subjects participating in this study are 158 non-English major students in Wuhan Technical College of Communications. They are randomly chosen. There are three instruments for statistics analysis in this study:1) a Chinese version of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) made by Horwitz et al (1986:129); 2) a Chinese version of The Metacognition Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) developed by Vandergrift et al. (2006); 3)Listening comprehension part of Practical English Test for Colleges (PRETCO-A,2008.6). The administration of the English listening test and the questionnaires is as follows:the students are made to do the listening comprehension part of the PRETCO (2008.6).;then the two instruments, the Chinese version of FLCAS and the Chinese version of MALQ, are administered. All the data collected from the English listening test, the FLCAS questionnaire and the MALQ are entered onto SPSS 11.0 for data analysis.The research results illustrate that English anxiety negatively affects English listening proficiency. As for listening metacognition, on one hand, it positively influences English listening proficiency. One the other hand, listening metacognition is able to influence English listening proficiency indirectly by predicting English anxiety. The further research tells that the listening metacognition, such as directed attention and planning & evaluation, has significant positive correlation with English listening proficiency. Besides, English anxiety, such as the communication anxiety, test anxiety and fear of negative evaluation, has significant negative relation with English listening proficiency. Based on the results, it is suggested that efforts should be made on the part of the vocational English teachers to reduce students'English anxiety, and the combination of the training of cognitive strategies with the training of metacognitive training will be effective for the improvement of vocational students'listening proficiency.