On The Application Of Metacognitive Strategy In English Listening Teaching In Junior Middle School

In English teaching, listening is the first in the four basic language skills. The improvement of students listening comprehension exerts a positive effect on the enhancement of their overall English level, so listeningcomprehension has a position not allowing to be neglected in English Teaching. At present, listeningcomprehension accounts for a large proportion in various English tests in China, among which even the highschool entrance examination has20points for its listening part. In current junior middle school listening teaching,the students are passive and reluctantly to learn listening and the teachers teach listening through repeating thelistening materials. Therefore, the achievement is not satisfied. How to improve the junior middle schoolstudents listening ability is a hot topic in the research field. In recent years, researches on listening strategytraining have become active, and many researchers try to improve learners listening proficiency throughlistening strategy training. Hence, the question of how to integrate the learning strategies into listening needs tobe studied.According to the findings of cognitive psychology, O Malley and Chamot (1985) classified learningstrategies into three categories. They are metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, and social/affectivestrategies. The metacognitive strategy is higher order of executive skills and is divided into planning, monitoring,and evaluating categories. In China, the studies on applying the metacognitive strategies into listening teachingare not rare, but most subjects are college students and senior high school rather than junior middle schoolstudents.Thus, this thesis summarized and analyzed the theory of learning strategies, the metacognitive strategiesand relevant theories of listening comprehension, and then applied them to junior middle school students listening teaching. The author tried to find the answers to the following questions:(1). What type of metacognitive strategies do the junior middle school students use more frequently?(2). Can the metacognitive strategy training improve the junior middle school students listeningcompetence and metacognitive strategies awareness effectively?In order to explore the two questions, one hundred and nine students were selected from two intact classesin junior grade one as subjects. And they received metacognitive strategy training in listening comprehension foreight weeks. These two classes were divided into experimental class and control class randomly. Before theexperiment, the author made a pre-test in two classes, and the scores indicated that the listening level of themwere the same. During the experiment, the author taught the metacognitive strategy in experimental class, and taught the control class in traditional way. After the training of eight weeks, the author made a post-test in twoclasses; however, the scores of experimental class were higher significantly than the ones of the control class. Atthe same time, the data from the students response to the questionnaire before and after the training showed thatstudents metacognitive awareness had been greatly improved. These results demonstrated that the training ofmetacognitive strategy has positive effects on junior middle school students listening comprehension.