Study On Metacognitive Awareness In L2Listening Comprehension

The thesis reports on an investigation into the metacognitive awareness in English as a second language (L2) listening comprehension in relation to the individual factors of age and listening proficiency. Two groups of students (N=155), who were respectively freshmen (N=80) at the first and third language stages from various disciplines and English majors (N=75) from the college of continuous education of a top comprehensive university, were involved in the study. Quantitative data collected using Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), developed and validated by Vandergrift et al.(2006), were processed in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version19.0running procedures of independent-samples t-tests and multivariant analysis (MANOVA). Listening diaries regularly kept by two adult participants also formed part of the data.The research posed three specific questions addressing whether age and listening proficiency correlate with the metacognitive awareness in listening comprehension. The analytical results reflected that both variables played constructive roles in the metacognitive awareness. Significant difference, despite small magnitude, was found between the two age groups on the overall reported metacognitive awareness. With regard to the second question, one noteworthy finding was that both factors of person knowledge and mental translation emerged to explain large proportions of variations in metacognitive awareness between the less-and more-effective listeners within the young group, which was congruent with several previous findings. The result for the third question was somehow equivocal. On the basis of the current findings, the study proposes an integrated model of metacognitive pedagogy for the EFL listening course drawing upon the prior studies in the hope of improving the efficiency of listening course.