An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Meta-cognitive Strategy Training On English Listening For Non-english Majors

Metacognitive strategy is a higher-level executive one among all the learning strategies.It involves planning,monitoring and evaluating.Mastering good metacognitive strategies,students are able to plan and select appropriate strategies for learning,evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy use and adjust strategies flexibly,which conform to student-centered autonomous learning reformation enforced in the field of language teaching in recent years.This study aimed at testing the effectiveness of metacognitive strategy instruction in English listening,verifying whether the students' listening comprehension ability gets improved through metacognitive strategy training,because listening is such a kind of complex cognitive activity,and the listeners are required not only to process all the linguistic information he/she received,but also to carefully make plan and evaluate for listening.A total of 172 non-English major freshmen from two classes of Shenzhen University participated in this study.One class was randomly assigned to the experimental class and the other one to the control class.Metacognitive strategy training was given to the experimental class on the listening lessons for 8 times.The control class was not given any intervention,but has the same listening materials and tasks as the experimental class.Two questionnaires and tests were given to the subjects both before and after the training to investigate their metacognitive strategy use frequency.The content for pre-test and post-test was selected from the listening comprehension section of CET 4 model tests.And eight students were selected randomly from experimental class to attend the follow-up interviews.All quantitative data were operated on the computer by SPSS 20.0.By analyzing the data of questionnaire,the author got the current situation of the non-English majors' metacognitive use in Shenzhen University: students have medium level metaconitive strategy use frequency before metacognitive strategy training.They can use some metacognitive strategies spontaneously in Englishlistening,but not very frequently.After metacognitive training on experimental class,metacognitive strategy use frequency was increased and present progress on all metacognitive strategy factors,especially on planning and evaluation,but the experimental group and control group showed no significant difference.Besides,it also found out that the experimental group made greater progress than the control group in the post-test,which verified the positive effectiveness of metacognitive strategy introduction to students' listening comprehension performance.