An Investigation Into The Correlation Between Non-english Majors' Metacognitive Awareness And Listening Styles

Listening is a basic language skill which plays an important role in students'second language acquisition. In recent years, many domestic and foreign scholars have paid close attention to it. While exploring the listeners' awareness and strategy processing, the researchers gradually discovered the importance of listening metacognition. However, the current researches on how to improve listening metacognition have not considered the factor of individual listening styles. Therefore, this paper intends to investigate the correlation between metacognitive awareness and listening styles, in order to find out the differences in metacognitive awareness for students of different listening styles.This study combines the quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to explore the following questions:1. what are the differences in metacognitive awareness between high-score and low-score students? 2. What is the relationship between metacognitive awareness and listening styles? 3. What are the differences in metacognitive awareness for students of different listening style? 4. What factors influence the students'listening? The subjects in this study are non-English majors of the 2nd year from Hebei University of Science and Technology. The investigation tools consist of two questionnaires and an interview. The data are analyzed by the social science statistical software SPSS 18.0.The findings of this study indicate that the high-score students have stronger metacognitive awareness than the low-score students. The correlation between the listening style and metacognitive awareness is significant. Specifically, the synthetic students have the highest level of metacognitive awareness in the aspects of planning and evaluation, directed attention and problem-solving. Next are the global students. The analytic students have the lowest level in the above three aspects. But there is no statistically significant difference in the aspect of mental translation among them. Compared with the global students and analytic students, the synthetic students have less anxiety but more self-confidence and higher self-efficiency in listening process. The results of the interview show that the influencing factors are phonetic knowledge, vocabularies, interests and the investment of listening time. Based on the above findings, some implications are made for both students and teachers. The analytic students might as well learn to use previous knowledge to make preparation before listening and make self-evaluation after listening, to use the known information to infer the unknown content, and to constantly focus on the listening material while listening. It is advisable that teachers foster the students" metacognitive awareness based on their listening styles; help the students reduce their anxiety, increase their self-confidence and self-efficiency; try to help them avoid mental translation in listening process; present interactive listening class to improve the students" interest, and try to develop their listening autonomy outside of the classroom.