The Application Of Meta-discourse To Listening Comprehesion Instruction In Senior Middle School

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four basics in foreign languageteaching. Listening and reading as two ways of input, pave the way for successfuloutput in speaking and writing.“Listening” as the most frequent activity in our dailylife, however is weakness of most senior middle school in English learning.Concerning this kind of teaching status and inspired by the research work ofXu(2004), Hyland&Tse(2004), Zhang(2012) and Karimi(2013), I am trying to find amore effective and efficient listening teaching method, based on the meta-discoursetheories put forward by Crismore(1983;1989), Vande Kopple(1985;1997;2002) andHyland(2000).Therefore, an experiment is carried out in two parallel classes in which one istreated as experimental and the other control. At the beginning, a pro-test is taken toensure they two are on the similar level in listening comprehension. After20sessionsof meta-discourse instruction in experimental class, a post-test is given to gain results.The results show that in general meta-discourse instruction helps students in listeningcomprehension and meanwhile it also enhances their organizational competence basedon their listening comprehension. The analysis and discussion of the results have a lotof implication for both teachers and students. For teachers, implications are varyingfrom how to choose appropriate materials for effective listening teaching, how toadopt the right teaching method to how to design listening test; while for students,implications are in respect of English learning strategies.