A Study Of The Correlation Between Senior High School Students’ Metacognitive Awareness And Listening Achievement

It is generally recognized that listening plays a significant role in language learningand daily life. It has a great significance to improve learners’ listening ability for theircommunicative competence and language proficiency. In China, English teachingreform has been carried out in primary school and middle school, which leads to agreat change in English teaching—from the traditional teacher-centered tostudent-centered. Then, the learning strategies, which teach learners how to learn,capture the attention of researchers. According to the classification of O’Malley andChamot (1990), among learning strategies, the metacognitive strategies are of the mostimportance, for they can monitor the whole process of learners’ learning. Althoughthere is a general agreement among researchers in education and L2learning thatmetacognition plays an important role in enhancing thinking and comprehension, it isonly in recent years that the importance of metacognitive awareness in listening hasbeen highlighted.However, researches on listeners’ metacognitive awareness of listening at homeand abroad are mainly about junior college students in vocational college s ornon-English majors and English majors in universit ies. There are just a very limitednumber of studies focused on senior high school students. On account of this, the studytakes200high school students as the subjects. B y employing a quantitative analysis ofa questionnaire and a listening test, the present study investigated and discussed thefollowing three questions:1) What is the current situation of senior high school students’ listening metacognitiveawareness?2) What is the correlation between students’ metacognitive awareness of listening andtheir listening achievement?3) What are the differences in metacognitive awareness of listening between high-andlow-proficiency listeners?Questionnaire used in the present study is adapted from Vandergrift et al.’sMetacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) with the change of thenumber of options. This empirical study aims to investigate the current situation ofmetacognitive awareness of listening among senior high school students, analyze thecorrelation between students’ metacognitive awareness of listening and their listeningachievements and compare the differences in metacognitive awareness of listening between high-and low-proficiency students.SPSS13.0was employed in the present study for analysis, with DescriptiveStatistics analyzing the current situation of subjects’ metacognitive awareness oflistening, Pearson Correlation investigating the relationship between metacognitiveawareness of listening and listening achievements and Independent Sample T-testexploring the differences in metacognitive awareness of listening between high-andlow-proficiency students. According to the data, the following conclusions weregenerated:1)Senior high school students’ metacognitive awareness of listening is at amedium level. Among them, awareness of person knowledge and problem-solving is atthe highest level, while awareness of planning and evaluation is at the lowest level.2)Metacognitive awareness of listening is positively and significantly correlatedwith listening achievement on the whole. Among the five categories of listeningmetacognitive awareness, problem-solving has the highest correlation with listeningachievements. Directed attention is in the second place, followed by planning andevaluation and person knowledge, while mental translation correlates negatively withlistening performance.3) Metacognitive awareness of listening differs greatly from high-andlow-proficiency students. In the listening process, the subjects with a certain level oflistening metacognitive awareness can monitor and reflect on their listening activity,adjust their listening strategies to better solve the listening problems to achieve highscores.Based on the above conclusions, some pedagogical implications have been madefor both senior high school students and foreign language teachers.