An Exploration Into The Metacognitive-strategy-based Teaching Model In College English Listening And Speaking Class

With the promulgation of “College English Curriculum Requirements”, the focus of foreignlanguage teaching in China turns to the improvement of students’ foreign language communicativeproficiency, especially their listening and speaking abilities. The development of listening andspeaking abilities requires not only teachers’ instruction, but also students’ autonomous learning.However, the regular teaching model only emphasizes teachers’ function of transferring knowledge,ignoring students’ autonomous learning abilities, which has a serious impact on the development ofstudents’ listening and speaking abilities. This paper explores the metacognitive-strategy-basedteaching model in college English listening and speaking class to change the regular teaching conceptby integrating teaching with learning. The model emphasizes not only teacher’s role but also students’ability to learn how to learn.Metacognition is a crucial concept in the field of cognitive psychology. Metacognitive strategiesare actions which go beyond purely cognitive devices. They provide a way for learners to coordinatetheir own learning process. Metacogniton is in nature the cognition of cognition. It helps to cultivatestudents’ metacognitive awareness and skills and train their metacognitive strategies. In the researchdone into the metacogniitve-strategy-based teaching model, three research questions are raised in thispaper. Q1: Whether metacognitive training can improve the experimental group’s metacognitiveawareness? Q2: Whether the experimental group who has taken metacognitive training will achieve abetter score than the control group who hasn’t taken that training? Q3: Whether themetacognitive-strategy-based teaching model is better than the regular one?In this research which lasted12weeks, the experimental group is taught in themetacognitive-strategy-based teaching model characterized with metacognitive strategy training,while the control group is still instructed in the regular teaching model without purposefulmetacognitive strategy training. The subjects in this study are all non-English majors from two classesin the first grade in Jincheng College of NUAA. Before the metacognitive training is conducted, theexperimenter gives both groups a listening and speaking test. After the metacognitive training, anothertest is given to the two groups. The metacognitive strategy training for the experimental groupincludes two metacognitive questionnaires done in the first week and in the last week respectively,students’ long-term plans in the first week, the planning, self-monitoring and self-evaluating strategytraining in class, students’ weekly diaries for monitoring their own study after class, and students’ evaluation in the last week of their performance throughout the whole semester. Quantitative data areobtained from questionnaires and tests. Qualitative data include students’ plan of the whole semester,students’ weekly diaries, and self-evaluation of the semesterResults show that the experimental group has made a great improvement in the questionnairedone in the last week than that in the first week, and qualitative data show that students in theexperimental group become more systematic in their study with growing abilities to self-monitor andself-evaluate. So the metacognitive training has improved the experimental group’s metacognitiveawareness. Also, with no significant difference in the pre-tests of listening and speaking and in thepost-tests after metacognitive training, the experimental group has made great improvements in thepost-tests of listening and speaking, while the control group hasn’t made any obvious improvement.So the experimental group who has taken metacognitive training has improved their listening andspeaking scores more quickly than the control group who hasn’t taken that training. From the resultsabove, we can draw a conclusion that metacognitive-strategy-based teaching model is better than theregular teaching model in improving students’ listening and speaking abilities. Metacognition plays animportant role in developing students’ listening and speaking abilities.