Metacognitive Instruction in L2 Listening: an intervention study.

• Author / Creator

  Toapanta Tuarez, Jesus L.

• This study compared three intact classes of Spanish learners who received three different types of listening instruction: a metacognitive pedagogical cycle following Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010), an awareness-raising approach which exposed L2 listeners to the factors associated with successful L2 listening, following the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (Vandergrift et al., 2006), and an approach that incorporated conventional practices such as pre-listening and post-listening activities in which key vocabulary and guiding questions were used to construct a better understanding of the audio text (Field, 2012). The intervention consisted of eight listening lessons delivered over the course of a semester to these three groups of intermediate language learners. Listening performance was measured before the intervention at pre-test, and after the intervention at post-test and at delayed post-test. The results of this study corroborate previous findings regarding metacognitive instruction in L2 listening (e.g., Cross, 2011; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010), and provide support to the notion that metacognitive awareness impacts the development of L2 listening positively (e.g., Goh, 1997). In this respect, participants exposed to the metacognitive pedagogical cycle showed statistically significant improvement from pre-test to post-test. Also, after statistically controlling for initial differences in listening ability, the Metacognitive Pedagogical Sequence group outperformed the Conventional Approach group at post-test. Moreover, participants in the Awareness-Raising group showed significant improvement from pre-test to post-test. The results also show evidence of long-term effects which can be attributed to metacognitive instruction in L2 listening. This study addresses concerns such as the need for intervention studies in L2 listening that identify what works best (Berne, 2004; Macaro et al., 2007) as well as long-term effects (Plonsky, 2011).

• Subjects / Keywords

  • L2 Listening Instruction
  • Intervention Study
  • Metacognitive Instruction

• Graduation date

  Spring 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-tbh8-ek23

• License

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