The Research Of Listening Instruction Based On Metacognitive Strategies Training In High School

Among all the learning strategies, metacognitive strategy is a higher-level executive one, which includes planning, monitoring and evaluating. It involves planning for learning, thinking about learning and how to make it effective, self-monitoring during learning, and self-evaluation of learning after the language activity is completed. It proves suitable for any kind of learning task. A good awareness of metacognition is the basis of the employment of metacognitive strategies. Once having good metacognitive awareness, students are able to assess the situation, to plan, to select appropriate strategy use, to monitor or evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy use and to revise the plan when necessary.Greater importance is being attached to the potential for greater use of metacognitive strategies. However, little has been reported about instruction based on metacognitive strategies in high school, especially on listening.This study reports a 3-month metacognitive-strategies-based listening instruction program for 50 freshmen from Wuhan No.4 High School in an attempt to cultivate learner autonomy. An idea was put forward that we should combine matacognitive strategies training with high school listening instruction.This program was designed to deal with three questions. The first is whether the training helps to improve learner's awareness. The second is whether the training has positive effect on learner's listening comprehension. The third is what are the general differences in relation to metacognitive strategies between successful and unsuccessful learners of the experimental group. This program adopted an embedded metacognitive strategy model, which consists of four aspects, i.e. developing students metacognitive awareness, planning and arranging behaviors, monitoring learning behaviors and evaluating listening performance. This program put forward an idea that our listening instruction or teaching should stick to two principles, i.e.student-centred and task-centred. It also suggested three steps for carrying out the training, i.e. pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening.Data analysis shows that through enhancing student's metacognitive awareness, the training has a potential positive effect on students' actual listening comprehension and that the successful and unsuccessful students differed with regard to the employment ofmetacognitive strategies.The study has important and productive implication for English listening instruction for high schools. The author suggested that integrating metacognitive plan is a practical and effective way to cultivate students' strategy employment awareness, which will lead directly to their better listening comprehension.