A Study Of Meta-cognitive Strategy On Computer-based Autonomous Listening

Cognitive psychologists O’Malley&Chamot classify the learning strategy into three categories in psychology:meta-cognitive strategy, cognitive strategy and social/affective strategy. The three strategies are based on cognitive process and among them the meta-cognitive strategy is the superior executive strategy, which includes planning, monitoring and evaluating the whole learning process.In order to adapt to the development of China’s higher education in the new era, and improve teaching quality to meet national and social demands for talents, the new version of College English Curriculum Requirements has been published in2007. It has pointed that "the objective of college English teaching is to train the comprehensive ability of the students, especially their ability on listening and speaking so that they can communicate in English more efficiently in their future work and social interaction". The College English Curriculum Requirements has also put forward the demand for strengthening students’autonomous learning skills and their overall cultural qualities to meet the need of international communication. Therefore, the research on the autonomous listening is a new tendency toward the future study.There are four autonomous listening rooms in Beijing Forestry University. The author conducted a survey from April19th,2010to April29th,2010in Room501of the school library and found that students were lack of consciousness for autonomous learning, and the effective utilization rate of the autonomous listening room was low. More than half students who came to the autonomous listening room did not do the listening at all. It was a great regret that the facility of the library had been wasted and students’learning initiative and potential development were interfered, as well. Therefore, with the aim of discussing how to effectively take advantage of the resources of school library and improve students’autonomous listening ability, the author does the research in this thesis.The theoretical foundations of the present study include Learner Autonomy and Meta-cognitive Strategy. By means of the meta-cognitive strategy training, questionnaire, pre-test, post-test, and semi-structured interview, the present study employs both quantitative and qualitative analysis to tackle problems mentioned above. The results of pre-test, post-test and questionnaire are made quantitative analysis and the qualitative analysis is done to the interview. In addition, a relevant research is carried out among113non-English majors in Beijing Forestry University. It is a study of meta-cognitive strategy on computer-based autonomous listening and results of this research show that the training of meta-cognitive strategy helps students use it better in listening. And their listening achievements have been improved to some extent. Thus the author reaches the conclusion:the meta-cognitive strategy training plays an effective role in students’ autonomous listening. Furthermore, some positive suggestions on how to make better use of the autonomous listening rooms of Beijing Forestry University are put forward.