Metacognitive listening comprehension strategies in ESL: an experimental study

Abstract

The research reported here is an experimental study designed to investigate listening comprehension strategy instruction. This study involves a comparison of the progress of an experimental and a control group of students of English as a foreign language at university level. The main purposes of the study are: a) to experiment with activities that can be used to train students to perform listening tasks and b) to determine the effectiveness of such training in both improving listening comprehension and in raising students’ awareness of the process of listening. Strategy training can be defined as any intervention which focuses on the strategies to be adopted and used by language learners to develop their proficiency, and/or to improve specific task performance. The investigation is based on the premise that by integrating a process approach into regular listening activities, we may be able to raise students’ consciousness of the process of successful listening. Thus, we may be able to help our students gain greater control over their listening efforts, the ultimate goal being the development of self-regulated listeners who can take responsibility for their language learning out of the classroom