An Empirical Study Of Metacognitive Strategy Training In Junior High School English Listening

Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard(2011)clearly puts forward that developing effective learning strategies is one of the important objectives.Therefore,the English teaching based on metacognitive strategy training is getting more and more attentions from researchers.In the previous studies,most of the scholars expound and clearly prove the positive effects of metacognitive strategy on English reading,writing and listening for college students.Based on the classification of metacognitive strategy by O'Malley & Chamot(2001),the study designs the listening teaching mode guided by metacognitive strategy training.The training procedure is designed on the basis of Underwood's listening teaching mode,and takes middle school students' psychological characteristics into consideration,so as to testify its feasibility.This study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods,aiming at finding out effects of listening metacognitive strategy training on using metacognitive strategies and listening performance of middle school students.It mainly enriches the empirical research of metacognitive strategies in China.Meanwhile,combining metacognitive strategies with listening teaching,the study provides some inspiration for middle school English listening teaching.In this study,students of two parallel classes from a middle school in Jining City were used as subjects to collect data through questionnaires,listening tests and interviews.The study lasted for three months: metacognitive strategy training experiments were conducted only for experimental class.Firstly,the author made a survey for the experimental class and control class students respectively before and after the meta-cognitive strategy training by questionnaires;Secondly,the experimental class received meta-cognitive strategy training,and then the author compared and analyzed the test results of experimental class and control class before and after the experiment;Finally,the author divided students in the experimental class into high-score group,middle-score group and low-score group and interviewed them to explore how these three groups accept meta-cognitive strategy and find their respective attitude towards meta-cognitive strategy.Therefore,this study verified the effectiveness of listening meta-cognitive strategy training.Then the results of this study show: the use of meta-cognitive strategy has been significantly improved after training(p=.000<0.05)and the students' listening performance has also been significantly improved(p=.001<0.05).From the detailed analysis of listening performance of high-score level,middle-score level and low-score level,the order of increase in scores is: middle-score level > low-score level > high-score level.After the interview,the middle-score students' learning efficiency is improved;the high-score students' accuracy of listening is improved;the low-score students' interest in learning is improved.Thus,the metacognitive strategy training is applicable to the teaching and learning of English listening.Based on the previous research,this study makes an innovation in the research objects and contents.It has enriched the theoretical research of listening metacognitive strategies and provided some inspiration for the teaching and learning of middle school English listening.At the same time,this study also has some limitations such as the lack of research time and the lack of research object.Future research should be directed to make up for the limitations of this study by expanding sample sizes and lengthening research time.