A Study On Junior High School English Listening Teaching Based On Cognitive And Meta-cognitive Strategy Training

Listening,placed at the first of the four basic skills of English,is of great importance for English learning.It is not only the main channel of language input,but also an important way of developing students' language sense and oral English.What's more,listening is considered as a significant tool of language learning and the content as well.The New English curriculum standard(2003)gives more specific,concrete and higher demand for junior high school students' listening comprehension.However,as listening comprehension has not been involved in senior high school entrance examination,teachers do not attach much importance to training students' listening ability in their daily class teaching.At present,English listening teaching in junior high school is typically in the way that the teacher presents several questions about the listening material and then plays the recorder repeatedly till the students finally find the correct answers.Such a listening model has lots of shortcomings such as time consuming,lacking of listening strategy guidance and doing no good for students' learning autonomy cultivation.O'Malley and Chamot's classification(1990)of learning strategies into three parts: cognitive strategy,meta-cognitive strategy and social-affective strategy based on Anderson's information processing theory has been widely accepted.And listening strategy training has been experimented in formal classes from the 1990 s.Listening instruction based on cognitive and meta-cognitive strategy training is a mode of listening teaching integrating strategy training into classroom listening teaching with the help of specific training materials.It's student-centered and stresses students' active participation and reaction in the learning activities;it aims to improve students' listening ability,arouse their learning interest and enhance their awareness of strategy use through teacher' explanation,demonstration of the specific listening strategies,and the evaluation of these strategies from the students.The researcher of this study chooses two classes of Grade Eight students from a Junior High School in Dalian as the research subjects.The study lasts for 12 weeks and students in different classes are taught with different listening teaching methods,one of which is based on cognitive and meta-cognitive training.It aims to verify whether the English listening teaching based on cognitive and meta-cognitive strategy training has an positive influence on the students' listening comprehension proficiency;it also aims to find out whether the students can fulfill the listening tasks more successfully and their awareness of strategy use and learning autonomy can be greatly enhanced through teacher's illustration of the listening strategies in the teaching.The study employs questionnaires,interview and listening comprehension tests to collect data.The software SPSS 21.0 is used to make analysis of the data gathered from the listening comprehension pre-test and post-test.The results of the study show that the listening teaching based on cognitive and meta-cognitive strategy training has a positive effect on students' listening ability development,and it can also improve their listening strategies awareness and learning autonomy.The study shows that students can clearly understand the strategies after the teacher's illustration and know better about the listening tasks they're supposed to accomplish and can do them better.