Empirical Study Of Metacognitive Strategy In English Listening-Teaching

English listening is an important way of EFL learning, which is also considered as a challenging skill in L2for Chinese learners. Many undergraduates encounter various problems and difficulties in English listening even if they have a good command of vocabulary and grammar. For example, they can’t recognize some words which they are familiar with in a written passage; they can’t pace up with the speed of the speaker; they are easily distracted and can’t get concentrated on the listening material; they can’t remember too much. There are many causes of these problems, one of which is that they seldom use strategies consciously to promote effectiveness. Though the importance of listening has been realized and performed in the curriculum design and testing, it is still a difficult problem for English teachers and learners to develop their English listening ability.It is necessary and essential to enhance strategy training in the course of English listening. The traditional way of teaching and listening by playing the tape and checking answers has greatly hindered the development of learners’ listening ability, resulting in the decline in learning interests. To learn English better, learners must be cultivated on the capacity of using metacognitive strategy etc, so that the students can become successful English listeners.An experiment was conducted in this study with an aim to confirm the effectiveness of using metacognitive strategy in English listening. Forty-five non-English major freshmen were chosen to be the subject in the experiment. Data was collected from pretest, posttest scores and questionnaires. The learners’weekly journals and teacher-student interview gave us other important information about the students’feelings and thoughts during this training program.The results show that the students benefit a lot from metacognitive strategy training. There is an obvious increase in the frequencies of metacognitive strategy use in the questionnaire and in students’test scores after the training. Metacognitive strategy training helps the students increase metacognitive awareness, improve listening effectiveness, develop their motivation and become autonomous listeners. Through metacognitive strategy training, students’ metacognitive awareness is obviously enhanced. They can apply appropriate metacognitive strategies to make plans before listening. While listening, they can monitor the listening process and take remedial measures. After listening, they can make right evaluation about the listening about the listening activities and results. As regard to English listening teaching, this training adopted student-centered teaching approach, putting emphasis on students’ role, while teachers become instructors and guiders in class. Higher requirements are brought up to the teachers. They are not only required to prepare phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, but also background information, discourse structures, key words and markers, etc. Teachers should demand students to pay attention to the order and logical relationship of the listening material to truly understand the discourse meanings. The research has its limitations. Firstly, the sample is small, which only includes45students. Secondly, time is not long enough to allow the training to be reconfirmed by repetition. Therefore, this research remains to be improved in later research.