Insights into young learners' metacognitive awareness about listening

Goh, C. C. M., & Kaur, K. (2013). Insights into young learners’ metacognitive awareness about listening. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 2(1), 5-26.

Background

The authors highlighted that, although research on children’s metacognitive awareness about listening had been increasing, few studies had focused on the influence of different types of listening texts.

Aims

The authors investigated the strategies young language learners reported using when listening to English texts, and whether there was a difference in the strategies reported as used by successful and less successful listeners, and in their perceptions of difficulty concerning different texts.

Sample

The participants included 12 English language learners aged 10-11 from an elementary school in Singapore.

Method

The learners attended three 30-minute listening practice sessions outside school hours where they listened to selected texts such as narratives, news reports and dialogues. Data collected comprised the students’ reflection diaries after the sessions, a questionnaire to find out about their metacognitive awareness regarding listening before and after the sessions, and a listening test that was administered as part of an end-of-semester assessment.

Findings

The diary entries showed that planning and evaluation were the most frequently reported strategies, followed by problem-solving and directed attention in both ability groups. However, the successful listeners reported more frequent use of strategies on the whole and specifically for planning and evaluation. For the problem-solving strategies reported in the learners’ reflections, apart from inferencing strategies, the learners across both ability groups did not report using any monitoring strategies when modifying their understanding. Overall, the mean scores for all four strategies after the reflection sessions increased for the less successful group, while the scores increased for only three strategies for the successful group. The more successful ones reported slightly more top-down strategies that utilised their background knowledge to aid comprehension beyond inaccessible words to a more general understanding of the message. Most of the learners found news reports the most difficult to understand, followed by narratives and dialogues.

Implications

The authors highlighted that although the learners demonstrated some metacognitive awareness about listening, their metacognitive knowledge about other listening processes had to be developed. As some of their strategies were test-focused and might not necessarily develop their listening skill, it would be critical to develop the learners’ listening abilities in communicative contexts and deploy the relevant strategies to meet these needs. Learners also had to enhance their knowledge about the structure of different types of listening texts, as well as develop better bottom-up processing abilities so that they could improve their word recognition and lexical segmentation skills.

Original article retrieved from Google Scholar.