On The Relationship Between English Listening Achievement And Metacognitive Awareness Of Non-English Majors

Listening is the core of second language learning skills, and the improvement of listening skill plays a beneficial effect on the development of other skills. In 2007, the Ministry of Education released College English Curriculum Requirements, which points out that the design of college English course should fully consider the development of listening and speaking skills, and give enough courses and credits. In the past twenty years, metacognition became not only a vital research topic for psychology, but also influenced the second language education. Researchers at home and abroad has done a series of empirical researches on metacognitive strategy for second language listening. In 2006, Vandergrift et al. developed a questionnaire for the assessment of metacognitive awareness in second language listening (MALQ). Taking metacognitive awareness in listening as the breakthrough point, through a period of training on metacognitive awareness, this thesis explore the relationship between learners'metacognitive awareness and listening achievement, the MALQ is adopted to investigate learners'level of metacognitive awareness in listening, so to find effective methods to improve students'English listening level.The experiment of this thesis carried out eight weeks to investigate the effects that metacognitive awareness training on non English-major students'metacognitive awareness level and their listening achievement, in order to explore the relationship between students'metacognitive awareness and listening achievements. After the experiment, SPSS 18.0 was used to analyze the collected data by using Descriptive Statistical Analysis, Paired Sample T-test and Pearson correlation analysis. Comparison was made to see the differences on students'metacognitive awareness level and listening achievement before and after the experiment. The effects of metacognitive awareness on listening achievement have been analyzed as well as the relationship between them. The major findings are as follows:1) Through training, students'level of metacognitive awareness has been improved. Through the instruction of listening comprehension course, the instructor guided students'to be aware of the use of strategies, so to raise their metacognitive awareness level.2) The improvement in metacognitive awareness has led to improvement in listening achievements. In the instruction process, it appears that the students with a raise in metacognitive awareness can use strategies better to solve the problem in listening process, which also leads to better listening achievement. 3) After training, among the five factors in MALQ, the subjects'levels of problem-solving, person knowledge, mental translation and directed attention underlying metacognitive awareness have been improved in a statistically significant level. There is no significant improvement in planning and evaluation. The reason for this may be the time limitation that is not enough for students to get fully involved and engaged in the classroom instruction.4) With the improvement of problem-solving and mental translation, metacognitive awareness and listening achievement are correlated at a statistically significant level. Though the correlations between other factors and listening achievement are above zero, which indicates a correlation, but they are not statistically significant.Based on the above conclusions, some pedagogical implications have been made for the teaching and learning of non-English major vocational students. Because of the low proficiency level of vocational students, when come to a relatively difficult material, students easily have anxiety of listening, which may lead to the failure of instruction. So in the classroom instruction, the instructors should not only design activities to help students improve their level of metacognitive awareness but also help them build self-confidence and set up a practical goal; reinforce their knowledge of English; provide abundant listening materials outside evaluation to increase the interest in learning.This dissertation consists of five chapters: in Chapter One, a brief introduction of research motivation and objects is given; while Chapter Two is the literature review; followed by Chapter Three, research methodology of this study is presented; in Chapter Four, after the data collection, a detail data analysis and discussion is made; at last, in Chapter Five, conclusions and implications for teaching and further research are provided.This study broadens the research related to metacognitive awareness in some degree, but there are still some limitations, and a lot for further study.