Experimental Study On The Effect Of Meta-cognitive Strategies Training On Junior High School Learners’ English Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension is an essential component of communication and a rather difficult language skill to acquire. It is a complex and an active process. Studies show that in one’s daily communication, approximately45%of the time is devoted to listening. Listening is an important part of English teaching in Junior high schools. However, in Junior high schools the traditional teacher-centered listening teaching is still playing a dominative role, which takes listening comprehension as a passive and receptive process and neglects the strategies that learners use to understand listening materials, to process information and to activate the prior knowledge etc. In recent years, studies on listening strategy training have become active, and studies show that students can indeed be instructed in strategy use to enhance their performance on listening tasks. But in China, studies in this field are relatively rare. Few researches have been done on the correlation between meta-cognitive strategies training and junior high school student’s listening proficiency. Thus, this thesis reports a tentative study on the effect of meta-cognitive strategy training on Junior high student’s listening proficiency. It adopts O’Malley and Chamot’s classification, and has adopted a meta-cognitive strategy-centered instruction model which consists of planning for listening, monitoring of one’s listening process and evaluating of one’s listening performance in English listening classroom. The study attempts to find answers to the following questions:1. Can meta-cognitive strategies training in listening class raise junior high school students’ meta-cognitive awareness?2. Can meta-cognitive strategies training in listening class improve junior high school students’ listening proficiency?80Junior Grade Three students from two intact classes in Experimental Campus of Shunde No.1Middle School participated in the16-week study, with one class(40students) as experimental group receiving meta-cognitive strategy training in class and the other (40students)receiving conventional listening instruction as the control group. Before the training, a listening comprehension pretest was conducted for the purpose of discovering if there are significant differences between the two groups. The results show there is no significant difference in their listening proficiency. And then a questionnaire of meta-cognitive strategies in listening was conducted among the students in experimental class to investigate students’ current use of meta-cognitive strategies in listening comprehension. The survey shows that most of them didn’t know how to use planning, monitoring and evaluation strategies, and how to adopt effective methods to improve their listening comprehension, not to mention making plans and taking measures to enhance their listening proficiency.Combined with the Shunde senior high school entrance examination, metacognitive strategy training were instructed in the process of listening comprehension, Through a period of16weeks of meta-cognitive strategy training, this study has achieved gratifying results. Contrast than before training (8.68%,10.39%,6.49%), their plan, monitor and evaluate strategies respectively increased by58.63%,38.54%and57.2%. The improvement is statistically significant. In addition, the comparison between the two groups’ pre-test and post-test of listening comprehension scores shows that the experimental class has greatly outperformed the control class in listening proficiency after training. Thus, we can see that the enhancement of meta-cognitive knowledge helps improve junior high school students’meta-cognitive ability to plan, evaluate and monitor their studies. In other words, the training has increased the frequency of using meta-cognitive strategies thus leading to the raising of meta-cognitive awareness in listening process.The above conclusion not only verified the hypotheses we had before starting the experiment, but also further confirmed some of the previous research findings. It is hoped that the research is helpful to all the English teachers who are trying to improve learners’ listening proficiency through listening strategy training.