A Study Of Meta-cognitive Listening Strategies Employed By Senior High School Students

Gilman and Moody (1984) stated that in daily communication, people spend40%to50%time listening, which suggests that the development of listening level means a lot to learners’communication ability. Meanwhile, according to the theory of Second Language Acquisition,language input is considered to be the basic tool in Second Language Acquisition, while listeningis an important source of language input. As a result, listening plays quite an important part inlanguage proficiency. However, listening ability is always considered to be one of the mostdifficult skills to control. It is easily influenced by noise, emotions and many other factors, and isalways "being gone in the blink of an eye". As a consequence, listening is usually considered asthe difficult point in second language examinations. Therefore，how to improve listening abilitybecomes a hot research question. Researches abroad on listening strategies started much earlier.With various forms of data collection, like listening dairies, class observation and questionnaires,researchers abroad have done many meaningful researches on listening strategies and trainings.Influenced by the significant researches abroad, such researches in our country develop graduallyin recent years. All these researches have made great contribution to our listening teachings.However, most researches are about college students, paying little attention to students insenior high schools. With the help of the Meta-cognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaireinvented by Vandergrift et al.(2006), this thesis aims at exploring two questions. The first one iswhether or to what extent meta-cognitive strategies are adopted by senior high school students.The second question is whether or to what extent the five aspects of meta-cognitive strategies areadopted in senior high schools. Questionnaires were handed out to two Grade Three classes inJining No.1Middle School and then data were analyzed with SPSS13.0. Results show that moststudents own a certain level of meta-cognitive awareness and are able to use meta-cognitivestrategies in their listening comprehension. The highest average value is in problem-solving,which means a good and frequent use of it. The lowest average value is in personal knowledge,which means that it still has a broad development space. The study, on the one hand helps seniorhigh school learners to realize the importance of developing meta-cognitive awareness. Abilitiesof planning, monitoring and evaluation throughout the whole listening process are supposed tobe developed to achieve the final success. On the other hand, it provides senior high schoolteachers with good feedback. Meta-cognitive awareness trainings should be integrated intolistening classes and teachers are supposed to take the scaffolding role in the teaching process.