An Empirical Study of Metacognitive Listening Awareness Instruction on Chinese University EFL Learners

This paper reports an empirical study on Chinese university EFL learners' listening performance after one-semester metacognitive awareness raising instruction. The learners filled in a Listening Activity Checklist as a means of raising metacognitive awareness in each listening class, and their listening performance and metacognitive listening awareness were measured at the beginning and the end of the semester by a listening test and the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire. The results showed that the instruction significantly enhanced the learners' planning-evaluation and person knowledge awareness, and consequently improved their listening performance. The study pedagogically implies the importance for teachers to enhance students' metacognitive awareness during the in-class listening activities so as to accelerate the process of its internalization and automatization.