An Experimental Study Of The Influence Of Peer Dialogue On The Metacognitive Awareness Of English Listening Of High School Students

EFL learners' listening comprehension is affected by many factors.Successful listening usually comes from three factors: cognition,emotion and listening text.Many studies have shown that learners' metacognitive knowledge is a major factor affecting learners' listening comprehension.Peer-peer dialogue intervention is a mediation,which enables peers to obtain external support such as language knowledge and information resources.With peer's interaction,learners' zone of proximal development will be regulated by peers and themselves.As a result,individual's cognition has been improved.However,studies on peer-peer dialogue listening at home and abroad are relatively inadequate,especially for high school students in large scale classes.Besides,most of previous researches focus on investigation studies and case studies.Therefore,this experimental study tries to explore the influence of peer-peer dialogue intervention as a mediation factor on high school students' metacognitive awareness of listening,so as to improve their autonomous learning ability.Three research questions are proposed as follows.(1)Does peer-peer dialogue influence high school students' English listening metacognitive awareness?(2)Does peer-peer dialogue influence high school students' listening performance?(3)Does peer-peer dialogue affect students' English listening metacognitive awareness in different English listening groups?This study conducts an 8-week teaching experiment on 96 students in a high school in Guangzhou.Two classes adopt the same listening teaching procedures.During listening activities,the experimental class adopts peer-peer dialogue intervention to activate metacognitive awareness of listening,while control class uses class intervention mode or independent work.Questionnaires and listening tests are conducted at the first and the last week.Teaching intervention and interviews are carried out at the rest of the weeks.Finally,by using SPSS.24 software,the relevant data are analyzed and discussed.The results of the data analysis display that:(1)peer-peer dialogue is conducive to the improvement of listening metacognitive awareness in five dimensions,planning and evaluation,directed attention,person knowledge,mental translation and problem solving.(2)In peer-peer dialogue,the listening performance in experimental class demonstrates a better promotion.(3)Peer-peer dialogue has a distinct impact on students with different English listening levels.High-level students perform better in directed attention,person knowledge and problem solving,but low-level students make a great enhancement in planning and evaluation,whereas the performance of mental translation is equal in three groups.The pedagogical implications of this study: firstly,in order to reach students' zone of proximal development,teachers should work out a reasonable grouping scheme by evaluating individual's characteristics and listening ability.Secondly,in peer-peer dialogue activities,teachers ought to shoulder their roles and responsibilities.Finally,teachers should design reliable and efficient listening activities to provide more effective mediation supports for students.