Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Listening is one of the most important language skills no matter in people’s dailycommunication or in language learning. It is critical for people to makecommunications at work and in daily life. Based on Gilman and Moody (1984), nearlyforty to fifty percent of people’s communication time is spent on listening, whichindicates that the improvement of listening comprehension ability is great significantfor people’s communication competence. Scholars in the field of second languageacquisition generally consider that the success of second/foreign language acquisitionis grounded in the large quantity of effective language input. So the improvement oflistening ability is critical to students’ second language learning since the listening isone of the primary mediums for language input.Being an important language skill, however, listening comprehension is often thesource of frustration for second/foreign language learners (Graham, 2006) andregarded as the most difficult skill by learners owing to its invisible and inaccessiblenatures. This situation is even more serious in Higher Technical and VocationalColleges. Most of the HTVC students do not have sound English foundation, show lessinterest in learning English, and are incapable of making communications in English.Their English proficiency, especially the listening comprehension proficiency, is faraway from the needs of the society. And the Basic Requirements for Higher VocationalEnglish Instruction (Requirements hereafter) issued by the Ministry of Education in2000 has also pointed out the ultimate goal for Higher Vocational College Englishteaching is to develop students’ English application ability, especially their listeningand speaking abilities. As a result, how to improve HTVC students’ English listeningcomprehension ability is of an urgent task and of great significance for enhancing theirintegrated English proficiency.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
In consideration of the above reasons, it is hoped that the following issues can beidentified through the implementation of the present research: firstly, to have a clearunderstanding of HTVC students’ metacognitive awareness on listening; secondly, tobe fully aware of the relationship between their metacognitive awareness and theirEnglish listening proficiency as well as that which factor has the most significantinfluence on the listening comprehension; finally, to find out whether there existsignificant differences in metacognitive awareness between high-listening proficiencyand low-listening proficiency students.The implementation of this research has great academic and practicalsignificance.From the literature review of this thesis, it is found that although a great numberof researchers have conducted studies to investigate the significant influence ofmetacogntion on foreign language learning as well as the listening learning at home and abroad, few of them have focused their attention on the Higher Technical andVocational College students’ English listening learning. Therefore, it is hoped that thisresearch can provide some enlightenment and inspirations for researchers to makefurther studies in this aspect.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
This chapter gives the literature review regarding the following aspects: theessence and cognitive process of listening comprehension and its vital role inforeign/second language learning; the definitions of metacognition and metacognitiveawareness, the interaction between metacognitive awareness and metacognitivestrategy as well as the related researches conducted at home and abroad; researches onEnglish listening teaching in HTVCs.
2.1 The Listening Comprehension
Listening is a vital skill in the language acquisition, and listening comprehensionis a complex cognitive process which needs a great deal of effort in the second/foreignlanguage learning process.According to Vandergrift (2002), Listening comprehension lies at the h
