An Empirical Study Of English Listening Instruction In Colleges Based On Cognitive And Metacognitive Strategies

In recent years, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to howsuccessful teachers and learners actually achieve their goals during second languageteaching and learning. Especially for the teachers, they have been led to study variousstrategies and students’ learning process in second language acquisition.According to second language acquisition (SLA) theory, language input is thebasic necessity in language acquisition and listening has taken a great part in thelanguage input. Meanwhile, according to previous scholars’ researches, strategies playan important role in the learning process. Therefore, this thesis aims to study andillustrate the importance of listening strategies in improving listening and show howeffective metacognitive and cognitive strategies-based instruction in improvingcollege English listening. In addition, this thesis also copes with the study on ways toapply strategies instruction to college students’ listening classroom.Different from traditional questionnaire researches, on one hand, it attachesimportance to the empirical studies and comparison between the combing twostrategies training and only cognitive strategy training. On the other hand, strategiestraining is embedded into the foreign language classroom teaching.Designing an experimental listening research, this thesis bases on cognitivestrategy and metacognitive strategy theory and Strategy-based Instruction (SBI). Theauthor first conducted an investigation on strategies employment and English listeningproficiency test for80sophomores in Guizhou Normal College, and results said thatthey were lacking of cognitive and metacognitive strategies which indicated theinstruction was of necessity. Two classes were involved: one class of40students whoreceived12weeks’ cognitive and metacognitive strategies instruction and it was theexperimental group (EG); the other class of40students comprised the comparisongroup (CG) which merely received12weeks’ cognitive strategies instruction. Thisstudy employed SBI model in both classes’s listening lessons, and it is relativelyinnovational now. The SBI lessons include five phases: preparation, presentation,practice, evaluation and expansion. The main cognitive strategies involved arepredicting, vocabulary, note-taking, grammar, inferring, meaning seeking, groupingand visual-image. Useful metacognitive strategies are mainly planning, monitoringand evaluating which act as complements. The author conducted pretest and protest before and after the training with different listening proficiency tests. But shedistributed the same questionnaire to students after the pretest and protest respectivelyto avoid reminding their usage of strategies during tests and the questionnaire was toreveal the subjects’ employment of strategies in listening. The collected date areanalyzed by SPSS17.0. And the study involves qualitative research like interview.The results of the experiment indicate: To begin with, listening proficiency testsshow that strategies training is effective in improving listening proficiency. Secondly,the same questionnaire conducted before and after the training indicates that strategiesinstruction is useful in enhancing learners’ awareness of strategies employment.However, the training doesn’ t influence much on the learning concept. Last but notthe least, EG outperformed CG in English listening proficiency after the SBI whichmeans the combing training of cognitive and metacognitive strategies-based trainingis more effective than the only training of cognitive. The EG which received themetacognitive training gained more benefits than the other group. There is one pointto mention, because of some reasons, only30results are effective in both groups atlast.The major contribution of the study is its demonstration of the effectiveness ofSBI for college students’ English listening proficiency and strategy use. Meanwhile itmay server as a reference for researchers’ further empirical studies.