Cognitive & Metacognitive Strategies in Listening Skills

We need to help our students acquire these strategies so that they improve their listening skills but to do this we need to teach them...

Create Self Regulation

Metacognitive learning Tasks

• Planning
• determine beforehand aims and decide means
• Monitoring
• check progress
• Evaluating
• determine success

Importance of Listening Skill

• The significance of listening is highlighted by research which has shown that “listening is the most frequently used language skill” (Nichols & Stevens, 1957, p.29)

• researchers have agreed that listening is the cornerstone of many theories of second language acquisition (Elkhafaifi, 2005; O’Malley, Chamot & Küpper, 1989).

• “proficiency in listening comprehension is readily transferable to other language skills” (Elkhafaifi, 2005, p.506).

• it is important to note that, for many foreign language learners listening has proved to be the skill that they found most difficult and also felt is the most difficult to improve (Graham and Marcano, 2008).

Types of tasks

Integrated Experiential Listening Tasks

• learners are guided at specific stages for successful comprehension
• give students set of prompts to guide learners (pre-listening), evaluate (post-listening) and plan future listening tasks
• language-focused activities (post-listening) to raise awareness of phonological features of text

Guided Reflections on Listening

• using guided questions students focus on specific listening experiences, recording issues
• in groups students discuss strategies for listening
• learners evaluate own knowledge and performance using a pre-selected items of metacognitive knowledge

The link between listening strategies and learners’ performance

• Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input (NCLRC, n.d.).

Modern Foreign Language Listening Strategies

• According to the National Capital Language Resource Center, “listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input” (n.d.).

• Learners who are conscious of their own listening problems may also be motivated to find ways of addressing them. (Goh,2008).

• Integrated Experiential Listening Tasks
• Allow learners to experience social-cognitive process of listening as they are working on specific activities, using texts from books or given material.
• Guided Reflections on Listening Tasks
• Allow learners to reflect and construct strategies, improving their listening experience.

• Pre-listening activities. Pre-listening activities involve mainly using top-down processing to prepare oneself for the incoming input. It prepares students to get ready to listen by thinking about the speaker and his purpose, the student’s purpose for listening and how the student’s previous knowledge and experience can help him to predict/relate to/interpret the incoming content (NCLRC, n.d.).

• Top-Down Processing. Top-down strategies are listener-based and involve the use of the listener’s background knowledge to help anticipate, and predict what comes next and to interpret the text (NCLRC, n.d.). Types of top-down strategies include predicting, summarizing and making inferences.

Listening skill and strategies

What is Listening?

Listening comprehension - the ability to accurately give meaning to the information to which one is listening (Ghoneim, 2013).

Listening comprehension strategies – “strategies that listeners consciously or unconsciously use in order to understand, analyze, and interpret a text” (Ghoneim, 2013, p.101).

Resources:

Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1996). Language testing in practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford

University Press.

Bozorgian, H., & Pillay, H. (2013). Enhancing Foreign Language Learning through Listening

Strategies Delivered in L1: An Experimental Study. International Journal of Instruction,

6(1), 105-122.

DeFilippis, D.A., (1980). A study of the listening strategies used my skillful and unskillful college, French students in aural comprehension tasks. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1980. Dissertation Abstract, 41, cts International.

Elkhafaifi, H. (2005) The Effect of Pre-listening Activities on Listening Comprehension in Arabic Learners. Foreign Language Annals, 38(4), 505-513.

Garrison, D. R., 1997. Self-directed learning: Toward a comprehensive model. Adult Education Quarterly, 48 (1), 18-34.

Ghoneim, N. (2013). The Listening Comprehension Strategies Used by College Students to Cope with the Aural Problems in EFL Classes: An Analytical Study. English Language Teaching,6(2), 100-112. doi:10.5539/v6n2pl00

Goh, C. (2008) Metacognitive instruction for second language listening development: theory, practice and research implications. Regional Language Centre Journal, 39 (2), 188-213.

Goh, C. (1997) Metacognitive awareness and second language listeners. ELT Journal, 51 (4), 361-369.

Graham, S., & Macaro, E. (2008). Strategy Instruction in Listening for Lower-Intermediate Learners of French. Language Learning, 58(4), 747-783. doi:10.1111/j.1467

9922.2008.00478.x

Hedge, T. 2000. Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Resources:

Nichols, R.G. & Stevens, L. S. (1957). Are you listening? New York: Mc Graw-Hill. O’Malley, J.M., Chamot, A.G., & Küpper, L. (1989) Listening Comprehension Strategies in Second Language Acquisition. Applied Linguistics. 10(4), 418 – 437.

NCLRC. The Essentials of Language Teaching. Teaching Listening. Retrieved from http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/listening/stratlisten.htm.

Introduction-

Cognitive Strategies

• Cognitive learning Strategies are the thought processes

• They help learners to deal with presented information in different ways (Hedge 2000).

• It is part of the communicative approach in leaning a new language (Bachman and Palmer,1996).

Aims of the Presentation:

• To introduce Cognitive and Meta-cognitive Learning Strategies

• Listening skill and applicable learning strategies

• Tips that assist the development of learning strategies for listening

Cognitive & Meta-cognitive Learning Strategies in Listening Skills

Introduction- Meta-cognitive strategies

• It is considered self-directed learning where students manage their own learning and monitor their own work (Garrison, 1997).

• It is thinking about one's own thinking

Cognitive & Meta-cognitive Learning Strategies in Listening Skills

Lee-Ann Pierre, Hanieh Akbarimehr, Maria Galleno

February 2015