An Empirical Study Of Metacognitive Strategy Instruction On Listening Skills Of English For Non-English Major Students

Listening, as a kind of complex cognitive activity, requires the listener to do the on-line processing of all the linguistic information he/she received. The particularities of listening make it a relatively difficult language skill to master, and lead to a key point in the field of foreign language teaching. With the development of the research about language learning strategies in recent decades, many scholars have proved the positive role of learning strategies in language learning process through plenty of empirical studies. However, among all the studies, few are focused on the metacognitive strategies which serves as a kind of high-order executive skills to monitor and regulate the whole learning process, even fewer are the empirical studies which applies metacognitive strategies to English listening teaching. The present study is an empirical study which focuses on the application of metacognitive strategies in English listening teaching. Specifically speaking, the present study aims at verifying the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy instruction, testing whether the students’ listening comprehension performance, metacognitive awareness and metacognitive strategy use can get improved through the training. And it also aims to explore the effective teaching methods to give metacognitive strategy instruction on listening lessons.The subjects of the research were the non-English major sophomores from two intact classes of Hubei University. The two classes were chosen from three classes taught by the same English teacher because these two classes showed no significant difference in the pre-test. One was set as the experimental group and the other as the control group. High-level groups and low-level groups were subdivided respectively in these two groups according to the students’scores in the pre-test. The metacognitive strategy instruction was given to the experimental group from the2nd week to the16th week in the semester, lasting for15weeks and totally gave8times’training on the listening lessons. The control group was not given any intervention, but was given the same listening materials and tasks as the experimental group. The questionnaire was given to the subject both before and after the training to investigate their metacognitive awareness and metacognitive strategy use. The pre-test and post-test adopted the listening comprehension section of CET4model test as their test content. The pre-test was given a week before the training, and the post-test was given at the week when the training ended.By analyzing the data of pre-test and post-test, it found that the experimental group and the control group showed no significant difference in the pre-test, but the experimental group showed great progress and did much better than the control group in the post-test. This result had verified the positive effectiveness of metacognitive strategy instruction to students’ listening comprehension performance. By analyzing the data of high-level groups and low-level groups, it found that although both the high-level group and low-level group of the experimental group had made progress in the post-test, the improvement of the high-level group was more significant while the improvement of the low-level group was not quite obvious. This result illustrated that the metacognitive strategy instruction was more effective to the advanced listeners but was not quite effective to the poor listeners. By analyzing the data of questionnaire, it got the basic situation of the non-English majors’ metacognitive awareness and metacognitive strategy use in Hubei University:the students had quite strong metaconitive awareness and could use metacognitive strategies quite frequently in the listening process even without metacognitive strategy instruction; After the students were given the instruction, their metacognitive awareness and metacognitive strategy use got slightly improved, but the improvement was inconspicuous.Therefore, the research finally comes to three main findings:first, the basic situation of Hubei University’s non-English majors’ metacognitive awareness and metacognitive strategy use is quite favorable. The students can spontaneously use some metacognitive knowledge to help them get better understanding in listening process. Second, the metacognitive strategy instruction has a positive effect on the students’ metacognitive awareness and metacognitive strategy use. Third, the metacognitive strategy instruction can help to improve students’ listening comprehension performance, but it is more effective to the advanced listeners, while it is less effective to the poor listeners.The research has proved that the metacognitive strategies can be effectively applied to English listening teaching and lead to a positive result. On the other hand, it also illustrates that the methods and approaches to give strategy instruction must take the individual differences such as one’s language proficiency into consideration. The effect of strategy instruction and teaching is not the same to all students. Lastly, the research emphasizes that the master of metacognitive strategies can not be gained by a short period of time’s training, but requires a long-term acquisition and internalization. It hopes to provide some help and suggestions to the further research on listening teaching and language learning strategies through this research.