Abstract:
The aim of the current study was to examine the effect of
metacognitive instruction, in comparison to the effect of
conventional teaching of listening (pre-listening, listening,
post-listening), on EFL learners’ metacognitive awareness of
listening strategies, listening comprehension, and oral
language proficiency Fifty students of two upper-intermediate
English courses participated in the study and were sampled as
the experimental and control groups. For sixteen weeks the
experimental group participated in metacognitive instruction
of listening with the aim of promoting their metacognitive
awareness of listening strategies while listening to oral texts.
Meanwhile, the control group received listening instruction
without any focus on strategies. The result revealed that, while
controlling for students’ entry-level metacognitive awareness
and English listening and speaking proficiency, the instruction
heightened the experimental group’s metacognitive awareness
significantly at the end of the experiment. Although a
difference between the listening ability of the experimental and
control groups was found, this difference did not reach the
level of statistical significance. As hypothesized, a significant
difference between the experimental and control groups’
speaking ability was found in favor of the experimental group.
Machine summary:
"Experimental studies followed to scrutinize the causal relationship between metacognitive instruction and improvement in strategy use (Graham & Macaro, 2008) and listening performance (Vandergrift, 2007; Zeng, 2007).
Empirical studies that followed showed that the choice and degree of listening strategies are related to listening task type (Chang, 2008) and perceived usefulness of strategies (Zhang & Goh, 2006) as well as learners’ attributes such as their learning style (Liu, 2008), listening ability (Shirani Bidabadi & Tamat, 2011), level of English language proficiency (Fewell, 2010), and listening anxiety (Golchi, 2012).
As research into metacognitive awareness about listening is still relatively new (Goh, 2008), more studies with learners of other languages and different ages in different learning contexts seem necessary to settle controversies (Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010).
Discussion The findings of the present study indicated a significant difference between control and experimental groups’ level of listening strategy awareness and perceived use, implying that giving guidance on the mental activities learners engage in to construct meaning when they listen "elicits and enhances learners’ knowledge about learning to listen" (Goh, 2008, p.
This suggests that specific metacognitive activities, explicit intervention in the classroom (Veenma & Spaans, 2005) and categorization of the manner in which strategy use is orchestrated while listening (Cross, 2009) sensitize language learners to the process underlying listening (Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010), help them to uncover the mental process that happens inside their head when they listen (Goh, 2008) and guide them on how to approach the task of listening (O’Bryan & Hegelheimer, 2009; Coskun, 2010)."