Junior High School-level Foreign Students' Listening Comprehension, Metacognitive Strategy

As one of the language skills and cognitive activities, listening is of vital importance that cannot be ignored in the daily life and language learning. The improvement of the listening ability and capability is closely related with the meta-cognitive strategy of the student. Among all the learning strategies, meta-cognitive strategy stands at a higher level, it sets the cognitive process as a target to be planned and controlled, takes mediation mechanism or recovery methods to solve the arising problems when necessary, and conduct timely evaluation of the cognitive process as well. In short, meta-cognitive strategy, which is a cognitive activity of a deep level, plays a very important guiding and coordinating roleIn light of the importance of the relationship between the listening comprehensive ability of Chinese as a foreign language and the meta-cognitive strategy, and on the basis of studying, collecting and combing the related academic researches and achievements both at home and abroad, we inspected the listening learning of around 100 preliminary-intermediate level foreign students from Shanghai International Studies University and International Department of Shanghai Foreign Language High School by means of questionnaire surveys and interviews. The essay is focusing on investigation of the general usage of meta-cognitive strategy during the listening process and its correlation with the listening capability, priorities are given to the different functions of the planning sub-strategy, monitoring sub-strategy and evaluating sub-strategy.The study shows that the most frequently used meta-cognitive strategies, in order, monitoring sub-strategy, planning sub-strategy and evaluating sub-strategy strategy. All the three sub-strategies are significantly correlated with the subject's Chinese listening scores, among which the monitoring sub-strategy ranks the most correlative one. Due to the direct connection between monitoring sub-strategy and the control of language, culture and related knowledge, the learners try to understand the listening materials by means of matching, extracting and consolidating the external stimulus with the internal reserved know-how in the process of listening. Therefore, the more monitoring sub-strategies used, the faster and more skillfully to transfer from phonetic codes to words or phrases. The successful learners and the less successful learners differ mainly in the quality and quantity of the usage of meta-cognitive strategies. Comparatively speaking, the successful learners employ more monitoring sub-strategies such as selective dispatch of notices, paying attention to the key words and sentences and active controlling of the inner and outer disturbs.The results of the research reveal a phenomenon: in regard with the usage of the meta-cognitive strategies in the Chinese language listening, preliminary-intermediate level foreign students are left in the inactive or semi-active manner. The'self-study'meta-cognitive strategies are not born but trained. Therefore, the study puts forward the tentative idea of implementing the training of meta-cognitive strategies in the process of listening learning, and sum up such eight training suggestions as to set a clear goal and plan for listening, to foster the language feeling of Chinese listening, to let students get involved in the process of material selection, preparation and elaboration, to train the selective awareness, to learn to monitor the listening process, to give full play to the meta-cognitive strategies in diversified modes of listening, to develop the ability of self-evaluation and to use the checklist of the effectiveness of listening. All the above mentioned suggestions are targeted to guide the foreign students to implement the knowledge and strategies of meta-cognition into the actual listening activities, so as to improve their Chinese listening comprehensive ability and their overall level of Chinese language.At present, the studies on the meta-cognitive strategies are still immature both at home and abroad. This study is just a trial study. Due to the limitation of the author's time and capability, there exists a number of weak points in the research, which need to be polished and developed in the future study.