An Experimental Study On Metacognitive Strategy Training In Junior High School English Listening

In the process of second language acquisition,listening cannot be ignored,for it is not only one of the standards to test learners' ability to use a language,but also the bridge to connect reading skills and communicative skills.Listening plays an important part in language teaching.However,in practical teaching,many teachers who are used to being the players and providers of listening materials regard listening as a passive skill.Meanwhile,many students think the reason why they do badly in listening is their poor vocabulary and grammar.In fact,one of the important factors is lacking metacognitive strategy.Flavell proposed “metacognition” in his study about children's thought process in 1976.He thought that metacognition is the process of thinking about thinking,which consists of three parts: metacognitive knowledge,metacognitive experience and metacognitive monitoring.Metacognitive strategies refer to the strategies used in the metacognitive process.O'Malley&Chamot divided metacognitive strategies into three parts: planning learning,monitoring your own speech and self-evaluation.Planning strategy means that learners make plans and arrangements to the learning goals,process and procedures before learning.Monitoring strategy means that learners monitor the learning process,methods,effects and implementation consciously of the plan according to the learning goals;Evaluation strategy means that learners' self-evaluation and adjustment of the plans and strategies according to the practical situation.Therefore,the thesis aims to study whether metacognitive strategy training can enhance junior school students' metacognitive awareness;and whether metacognitive strategy training can improve junior school students' ability to catch story plots while listening.The research was carried out with 116 students of two grade-eight parallel classes in Junior high school.One of them is the experimental class,the other is the control class.Each class consists of 58 students.The subjects are from the Xingtai Nineteenth High School in Hebei province.The experimental class received metacognitive strategy training in the regular course,while the control class still remained the traditional approach.This research lasted a whole semester which was based on the theory of metacognition and metacognitive strategies.And it took a questionnaire,two listening texts as the research instruments.When the data was collected,SPSS 13.0 was used to analyze the statistics.According to the result of the research,after the metacognitive strategy training in listening of the experimental class of the whole semester,students' metacognitive awareness was enhanced,and their ability to catch the story plots while listening was also improved.