Abstract:

Languages have played a vital role in the development of humankind and the advancement of civilizations [1]. One of the crucial skills to be a competent user of a language is listening. Field [2], maintains that listening, though much needed, methodologically has not been given as much thought as other skills in the classroom, which, unlike listening, render higher control and have been better methodologically approached, such as reading and writing.

Understanding context is thought to be a very useful strategy to understand messages, but it is a top-down strategy, not a universal solution to understand spoken language. Unfortunately, neither classrooms are the only real-life scenarios, nor are learners learning English only and exclusively to be successful tests takers. Therefore, in order to improve foreign language listening competences on students, we have developed an alternative methodology, following authors such as Vandergrift, Goh, and Field [3,4]. In this way, students can benefit from other listening approach different from the “True/false” and multiple-choice tests presented in most textbooks. Our proposal is a combination of the bottom-up and top-down approaches, based on the metacognitive pedagogical model for listening of Vandergrift and Goh [3] which provides a combination of a tried-and-tested sequence of listening lessons and activities that show learners how to activate processes of skilled listeners. The main objectives of this study are (1) to analyze how Vandergrift’s Metacognitive Pedagogical Sequence fosters understanding of main ideas, details and decoding among beginner language students and (2) analyze the results on the development of students’ listening skills.

The methodology implemented to experiment teaching metacognitive strategies was direct instruction, in which the teacher explained the steps to approach listening metacognitively: (1) planning for the activity; (2) monitoring comprehension; (3) solving comprehension problems; and (4) evaluating the approach and outcomes [4] for 12 hours during a period of 3 weeks in an ESIC's B1 English class with 12 students. The experimental intervention started with a baseline Metacognitive Awareness for Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) [4] intended to determine students’ awareness of metacognition before the intervention. The subsequent 11 hours of class where devoted to teaching the 4 metacognitive steps to listening. Two tests were carried out during this period in order to assess gains in listening skills, and a final MALQ questionnaire was given, to measure behavioral change after the experiment.

References:
[1] A. L. Leal-Rodríguez & G. Albort-Morant, “Promoting innovative experiential learning practices to improve academic performance: Empirical evidence from a Spanish Business School”. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, vol.4, no.2, pp. 97-103, 2019.
[2] J. Field, Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
[3] M, Rost, Teaching and researching listening. Edinburgh: Pearson Education Limited, 2011.
[4] L. Vandergrift & C. Goh, C, Teaching and learning second language listening. Metacognition in action. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Keywords:

Listening, metacognition, pedagogical model, language learning.