The Application Of Metacognitive Strategy Training To English Listening Teaching In Higher Vocational College

The cultivation of learning strategies, to a large extent, can accelerate students’ English learning and improve their English proficiency. Among all learning strategies, metacognitive strategies is on the top level. It means that learners plan, monitor and evaluate their learning process through the use of their metacognitive knowledge. There have been abundant studies on the application of metacognitive strategies to speaking, reading and writing both at home and abroad, while fewer are related to higher vocational colleges. With the continuous reform of English teaching in higher vocational colleges, the application of metacognitive strategy training to English listening teaching is of great practical significance.Based on the classification of metacognitive strategies by O’Malley and Chamot and the teaching model of Underwood, the study divided the whole listening process into three parts:the planning strategies before listening, the self-monitoring strategies while listening and the self-evaluating strategies after listening. This empirical study aimed to discover the relationship between metacognitive strategy training and the English listening proficiency.Eighty non-English major students in Zhengzhou Tourism College were chosen as the subjects of this study. They were from two different classes.One class was the experimental group and other was the control group. The experimental group was given the metacognitive strategy training in English listening while the control group received the traditional method without metacognitive strategy training. The data collected from questionnaire and English listening tests were quantitatively analyzed by SPSS 20.0. The data from interviews in the experimental group after training was qualitatively analyzed.The results of the analyses suggest that metacognitive strategy training can improve students’ English listening proficiency. In the experimental group, students’ listening proficiency is significantly improved after training. Moreover, from the pre-training and post-training questionnaires, it was found that there is a significant increase in metacognitive strategy use frequency and awareness. So we can come into the conclusion that the English listening teaching based on the metacognitive strategy training has the positive effect on the improvement of students’ English listening proficiency. This study can not only enrich the research field of metacognitive strategies, but has important reference significance for improving students’ self-learning ability, arousing their learning motivation and interest and enhancing their self-monitoring ability.