A Study On The Relationship Between Higher Technical And Vocational College Students’ Metacognitive Awareness And Listening Comprehension Proficiency

As one of the primary mediums for language input, listening plays an importantrole in students’ foreign language learning, and hence the listening comprehension iscritical for the improvement of students’ comprehensive English proficiency. However,the listening comprehension is generally considered as the most difficult skill to masterby foreign language learners since it is invisible, inaccessible and ephemeral. Thissituation is even more serious in Higher Technical and Vocational Colleges. Students invocational colleges are faced with more difficulties in their English learning.Nevertheless, with the increasingly frequent International exchanges and the growingdemand for advanced applied talents at home and abroad, the requirements for HigherTechnical and Vocational College students’ comprehensive English proficiency andEnglish application ability have been dramatically increased. Therefore, it is an urgenttask to improve their English listening comprehension proficiency as well as theircomprehensive English proficiency.“Metacognition”, this concept was firstly put forward by the Americanpsychologist J. H. Flavell. In the past two decades or so, it has become the hot issue inthe field of psychology. Meanwhile, it also has profound impact on foreign/secondlanguage learning and teaching. Metacognition is generally considered as one’scognition about the cognition. In the matter of foreign language learning, it refers tostudents’ awareness/consciousness about their learning process and their control andregulation of the learning process. Many researchers in the field of second languageacquisition have proved that learners with higher metacognitive awareness have betterperformance in planning, regulating and evaluating their learning activities, and are aptto become autonomous learners. However, most of the studies conducted merelyconcern English majors or students in regular colleges, and rather little attention hasbeen paid to the students in Higher Technical and Vocational Colleges.Therefore, taking the136non-English major students in Chongqing College ofElectronic Engineering as the subjects, this study aims to investigate students’metacognitive awareness about listening, and the relationship between theirmetacognitive awareness and the listening comprehension proficiency. The data of thisresearch is collected by one questionnaire, one English listening test and asemi-structured interview. The instrument for data analysis is the SPSS19.0. Three research questions have been put forward:①What metacognitive awareness do Higher Technical and Vocational Collegestudents have about their English listening?②To what degree does their metacognitive awareness correlate to their listeningcomprehension?③Are there any differences between high-proficiency and low-proficiencylisteners in regard to their metacognitive awareness? If any, what are the differences?The following results have been achieved:Firstly, the Higher Technical and Vocational College students have a mediumlevel of metacognitive awareness about listening in general. Among the five subscalesof metacognitive awareness, the Mental translation gets the highest score; the restsubscales follow a descending order by Inference and association, Person and taskknowledge, Planning and evaluation and Directed attention;Secondly, their metacognitive awareness is significantly and positively correlatedto the English listening comprehension proficiency. However, the correlationcoefficient is relatively low;Thirdly, the high-listening proficiency and low-listening proficiency studentsreveal significant difference in metacognitive awareness. Among the five subscales,there exist significant differences in Inference and association, Person and taskknowledge, Planning and evaluation and Directed attention.This research is attempting to provide the evidence and put forward suggestionsfor the improvement of students’ listening proficiency as well as the English listeningteaching in Higher Technical and Vocational Colleges on the basis of the results of thisstudy.