A Study On The Relationship Between The Metacognitive Awareness Of English Listening And The Level Of Listening Comprehension Of High School Students

Listening is an essential part of daily communication and an important part of high school English learning,therefore how to effectively carry out listening teaching is a hot issue to which scholars and English teachers have been paying attention.Vandergrift(2006)pointed out that second language listening proficiency is affected by many factors,such as native language listening proficiency,second language proficiency,phonetic memory,vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive factors.Based on this,researchers have been actively exploring the learners' performance in the process of listening comprehension,then gradually discover the importance of metacognitive awareness in listening activities and try to reveal the relationship between learners' metacognitive awareness in listening and listening comprehension proficiency.At present,studies in this field mainly focus on undergraduates,lacking concern for middle school students who are at a critical stage in cognitive development and foreign language development.Therefore,this study is intended to investigate high school students' metacognitive awareness in English listening and to explore the relationship between high school students' metacognitive awareness in English listening and their listening comprehension proficiency by combining quantitative and qualitative research methods.Three types of instruments are used to collect data from 65 high school students,including the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire proposed by Vandergrift et al.(2006),listening comprehension tests and interview.The paper firstly analyzes the correlation between high school students' comprehensive metacognitive awareness in English listening and their listening comprehension proficiency,as well as its impact on high school students' listening comprehension proficiency.Then,the study delves into an in-depth discussion of the relationship between the five factors of metacognitive awareness and participants' listening comprehension proficiency,with the purpose of exploring the effective measures to raise high school students' metacognitive awareness and to promote the development of their listening comprehension proficiency.The data are statistically analyzed by the use of descriptive statistics,unitary linear regression and multivariate linear regression in SPSS19.0 software.Together with the results of the interview,the major findings of the study are as follows :1.High school students' comprehensive metacognitive awareness in English listening is at a medium high level.Specifically speaking,problem solving,directed attention and planning and evaluation are at a high level,and mental translation and person knowledge are at a medium level.2.There is a positive correlation between high school students' comprehensive metacognitive awareness in English listening and their listening comprehension proficiency,and it can explain 21.4% variation of their listening comprehension proficiency.3.There is a positive correlation between high school students' person knowledge,directed attention,problem solving and their listening comprehension proficiency,whereas participants' mental translation correlates negatively with their listening comprehension proficiency and there is no correlation between their planning and evaluation and listening comprehension proficiency.In addition,person knowledge,problem solving and directed attention have a predictive effect on learners' listening comprehension proficiency,though the effect reduces gradually.The other two factors,mental translation and planning and evaluation have no obvious effect on learners' listening comprehension proficiency.This study reveals the relationship between high school students' metacognitive awareness in English listening and listening comprehension proficiency,and,furthermore,explores the effects of metacognitive awareness in listening on participants' listening comprehension proficiency.Therefore,the study can provide some useful implications for improving the quality of high school English listening teaching and promoting the listening comprehension proficiency of high school students.Meanwhile,it can lay an empirical foundation for further research in this field.