The Effect of Teaching Metacognition on the EFL Students’ Listening Performance

By Siti Masfufah

Listening has been an interesting skill to be researched in the ELT field. The image of listening has changed since the 1970s; it was viewed as a passive skill, but now, it is seen as a complex process in which listeners have to distinguish phonemes, recognize words and grammar, comprehend intonation, and other supra segmental features, then maintain information listened for long time to be interpreted based on the context (Vandergrift 1999, 2004).  Vandergrift (2004) reviews the changes of approach of teaching listening. Initially, it was ‘listen to repeat’ (an approach of audio lingual method). Then, it was ‘question-answer’ (a comprehension approach. After that, it became ‘real-life’ (being involved in an interaction). The next, it focused on the product of (listening to learn). Recently, it is ‘learning to listen’.

Listening is the main activity to do to be able to use a new language. In learning a new language, listening is the first step that helps students learn the language (Vandergrift 1999) because it leads to the understanding of spoken English (Richards 2008). According to Richards (2008), English listeners find English speakers speak very fast even though the rate of delivery was normal because the characteristics of spoken discourse is different from the written one. Therefore, listening is considered as the hardest skill to learn (Vandergrift 1999, 2004).

As listening is difficult to learn, teachers should pay attention to this skill. Teachers can be the facilitators that help students learn listening more easily (Thompson and Rubin (1996). To learn listening effectively, students need to know strategies to comprehend listening (Cross 2009; Thompson & Rubin 1996). Unfortunately, some language students might not know how to improve listening and apply the strategies very well (Lee 2010).  In other words, students need guidance how to use them in language learning (Lee 2010).

Beside listening comprehension strategies, Lee (2010) and Mistar (2011) suggest teaching learning strategies to help students’ success in listening comprehension. In addition, Richards (2008) recommends teaching cognitive and metacognitive strategies for listening comprehension. According to Anderson (2002), the use of metacognitive strategies can enhance students’ thinking that results in powerful learning and increases students’ performance, especially for highly motivated students.

Listening Strategies

According to Cohen and Weaver (2005), strategies to improve listening are making students familiar with the sounds of the language and applying metacognitive strategies. Metacognitive strategies are strategies that students apply for planning what they are going to do, monitoring how they have been working on goals related to the language, and evaluating their performance.

Cohen, Oxford, and Chi (in Cohen & Weaver 2005) mention 26 items of listening strategies. The items are listed on the Language Strategy Use Survey. The survey consists of strategies of increasing the exposure to the language, strategies of being familiar with the sounds of the language, strategies before listening to conversation in the language, strategies while listening to conversation in the language, and strategies when students do not comprehend some or most of one says in the language.

Language Learning Strategies

Research about language learning strategies have been growing since the 1970s (Lee 2010). Mistar (2011) found that the use of language learning strategies significantly affected Indonesian students’ listening performance, structure and written expression of the TOEFL but not the reading section.

Cohen (1996) differentiates between language learning strategies and language use strategies. Language learning strategies are strategies used by students to enhance their learning a new language. While, language use strategies are specific actions or behaviors of using the new language.

According to Oxford (2003), there are six main categories of language learning strategies. The first is cognitive strategies. These are strategies of manipulating language materials directly such as reasoning, analyzing, note-taking, summarizing, synthesizing, outlining, recognizing, and practicing. The second is metacognitive strategies. These are strategies of managing the overall learning process such as identifying learning style preferences and needs, planning tasks, collecting and organizing materials, determining place and schedule of studying, monitoring errors, and evaluating progress of applying learning strategies. The third is memory-related strategies. These are strategies of relating new language features to another to learn and gather information through acronyms, rhyming, pictures, body movements, tools, or places. The fourth is compensatory strategies. These are strategies of getting missing knowledge such as guessing from the context, using synonyms, and using getsures and pauses. The fifth is affective strategies. The strategies are strategies to identify someone’s mood and anxiety such as talking about feelings, appreciating good accomplishments, using breathing technique or instilling self-positive words. The sixth is social strategies. These are strategies of working with others such as asking for verification, clarification, interaction with others, and discovering cultural and social values. To measure studens’ use strategies, it is suggested to use self-report surveys, observations, interviews, student journals, think-aloud techniques, and other techniques or tools.

Metacognition

Briefly, metacognition is ‘thinking about thinking’ (Anderson 2002; Livingston 1997). Anderson (2002) states that when students find something making them think how to think, they are engaged in metacognition. He adds that students who are met cognitively aware, they know what to do (strategies) when they do not know what to do.

Livingston (1997) mentions metacognitive knowledge consists of three variables: person, task, and strategy variables. Knowledge of person variables is knowledge of how to learn and process information productively. Knowledge of task variables is knowledge related to the nature of the tasks (e.g. which task is easier to comprehend first). Knowledge of strategy variables is knowledge including cognitive and metacognitive strategies: when and where to use appropriate strategies.

In addition, Livingston (1997) asserts that cognitive and metacognitive strategies may overlap each other because metacognition involves active control over the cognitive processes. The difference between both strategies is the purpose. To achieve a certain goal (e.g. understanding a text), cognitive strategies exist there; to ensure that the goal has been reached (e.g. quizzing oneself to evaluate ones’ understanding of that text), metacognitive strategies work there. In other words, self-questioning can be a cognitive strategy if it is used as a means to obtain knowledge and can be metacognitive strategy if it is used to monitor what one has obtained.

To teach metacognition in language teaching and learning, Anderson (2002) develops metacognition model to help students learn to think of what happens during the language learning process so that it will result in gaining more powerful learning skill. The model consists of five stages.

1) Preparing and planning for learning: engaging students to relate their learning to the goal of their learning and to think how they accomplish the goal of learning. It can be made by the teacher or by students themselves so that they can measure if they can achieve the goal of the learning.

2) Selecting and using learning strategies: teachers should teach students variety of learning strategies (e.g. listening strategies) and teach them when to use them. Teachers should inform them as well that there is no single strategy that will work in a short time.

3) Monitoring strategy use: monitoring strategies used by students helps them to keep on track of their learning to achieve their learning goals.

4) Orchestrating various strategies: teacher should teach students how to coordinate, organize, and make associations among the various strategies.

5) Evaluating strategy use and learning: the stages one to four are evaluated in this stage.

Listening Strategy Instruction

According to Mendelsohn (in Renandya 2012), strategy instruction is the root of strategy-based approach. Its objective is to teach students how to listen. There are three stages in listening strategy instruction. The first is making students aware of how language functions is by developing metalinguistic awareness. The second is making students aware of the strategies they use by developing their met strategic awareness. The third is instructing students in the use of additional strategies that will assist them in tackling a listening task.   

Even though teaching strategies in listening instruction is suggested by some researchers like Vandergrift (1999 2004) and Cross (2012), Renandya (2012) argues that listening strategy instruction is not a good idea, especially for low proficiency students who are still working hard on recognizing words. There are five reasons behind his argument. The first, he states that there are only a few experimental studies showing positive effects of strategy training on L2/EFL listening comprehension. The second, to implement the strategy instruction, teachers need to know a lot about principles and implementing the strategies. The third, teachers and students view that low proficiency students have a lot of problems with word recognition, vocabulary, and rate of speech delivery. The next, low proficiency students find difficulties applying listening strategies because of the word recognition problems. The last reason is strategies of predicting and inference do not need to be learned because people do both all the time. However, Cross (2012) argues that Renandya is too early to draw such conclusion because more research is needed in the field of listening strategy instruction as Vandergrift (2004) states that literature of listening strategy instruction has grown poorly if it is compared to the other skills.