The Study Of Metacognition In Senior Middle School Listening Teaching

In the past few decades, learning strategy has become one of the hottest topics in the field of language learning and teaching. While early studies on learning strategies were more exploratory in nature, later research became more theory-based and more scientific. Most recently, researchers have noticed that one group of learning strategies (MLS) are of specific importance. However, many previous studies were focused mainly on metacognitive strategies (MS) or metacognitive knowledge (MK) respectively, while studies on metacognitive learning strategies are quite few.Of the four language skills - listening, speaking, reading and writing, listening is first. According to the theory of the second language learning, language input is the most basic term of language acquisition .If there is no language input ,there is no language acquisition (Krashen,1985 ).Listening as a kind of input skill plays an important part in students' language acquisition . According to American language teaching experts W.M.Rivers and M.Stemperly, the proportion of listening reaches more than 45% in communication activities . But, the English teaching of our country often simply emphasizes in the vision input (reading), neglecting hearing input (listening). Thus most of the English learners are very poor in listening comprehension ability and it influences the absorption of the language seriously and it influences the cultivation of communication ability.One hundred and seventy-one students of Senior 1 from three intact classes participated in the one-term study: one class of 58 which received metacognitive instruction comprised Experimental Group 1; another class of 56 comprised Experimental Group 2, receiving strategy instruction without metacognitive component; and the last class of 57 served as Comparison Group receiving instruction. After the one-term training, the listening average result of Experiment Group 1 was 23 (the full mark is 25 ), Experiment Group 2 was 21, Comparison Group was 19. The students showed their opinions on listening teaching and metacognitive strategy training. The results showed that metacognitive training helped students improve their listening performances as their views towards foreign language learning.