The Relationship between Intermediate EFL Learners’ L2 Listening Performance and their Meta-cognitive Awareness Strategies

Abstract

According to Vogely (1998), listening as one of the most important means of communication plays a very crucial role in acquisition of foreign language since this skill accompanied by reading feed learners with the necessary information (Serraj & Noordin, 2013). The present study investigated the relationships between metacognitive awareness strategies and listening performance. Fifty-six EFL students, both male and female, took part in this research. In order to make the participants homogeneous, Cambridge Placement Test was run and 30 learners were selected as the final participants. After homogenizing the students as intermediate ones, the valid questionnaire of Metacognitive Awareness Listening Comprehension (MALQ) by Vandergrift et al. (2006) was administered to the 30 intermediate students. Having administered the questionnaire, the researcher asked the subjects to sit for an IELTS listening test taken from Cambridge IELTS. Results indicated that the metacognitive awareness strategies as well as its sub-categories of planning and evaluation, problem solving, mental translation, person knowledge, and directed attention had a significant relationship with learners’ listening performances, illustrating that Iranian EFL learners would utilize all the strategies while dealing with listening performances. The results of this study may provide insights into helping EFL learners to increase the level of their confidence. The outcomes also can help language instructors to realize the highly and lowly used strategies so that they can elaborate on them and help learners to attach more attention to the unused or less used strategies and stabilize the others.