Research on the effects of ruction has provided preli perforonfidence, and hrough classroo (e. g., Goh & Yusnita, 2006; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010).
One co in listening is a sequence of activities that encourage planning, monitoring, and evaluating strategies usedwhen listening to a selected text. Chamot (1995) suggested a procedure where teachers model how they themselves use strategies when listening to a tape or watching a video with new information. Before listening, the teacher would read aloud about what he or she already knows about the topic and what words one might expect to hear. After listening to a short segment of the text, the teacher would read aloud again, describing the mental processes involved during listening, coher the predictions have been confirmed or rejected. Finally, the teacher evaluates his or her use of strategies for the particular text. Listening tasks that guide students through the process of listening, i. e., by engaging theonitoring, evaluating, and proble help learners develop the itive knowledge critical to the development of self-regulated listening.
To explore the benefits of ening training, Goh & Yusnita (2006) conducted a small-scale study with 10 primary school pupils in Singapore. Eight listening lessons were conducted. Each lesson followed a three-stage sequence: listen, answer—reflect—report, and discuss. In an additional lesson conducted the week after the last listening lesson, each pupil wrote a short reflection on their listening ability at the end of the eight sessions so as to consolidate their itive knowledge about the listening process. To assess the value of ruction, the researchers also pared the pupils' listening test scores before and after the intervention. The results led the researchers to a conclusion that the process-based lessons had two benefits for young L2 learners. Firstly, the pupils reported an increase in their confidence and itive knowledge. ally, their strategy knowledge had increased. Secondly, there was strong indication that ruction had contributed to the pupils' i scores.
O'Bryan & Hegelheiigated the ening strategy use and awareness of four intermediate students over a one-semester-long ESL listening course at a university in the United States. A series of different types of classroom-based listening strategies were designed by the instructors and taught to the students in the forused on either demonstrating or encouraging students to review and practice listening strategies. At the beginning and the end of the listening course, the itive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (Vandergriftetal., 2006) was administered as a pretest-posttest instrument to explore the impact of listening strategy instruction and to assess the students'growing itive awareness of strategies. Verbal protocols, semi-structured interviews and student notes were also used as instrut data for the investigation of the students' listening. The study identified students'use of such rategies as double-check prehension monitoring, proble and advanced organization. The investigation of development of hroughout the semester identified increased awareness in problem solving strategies and person knowledge but no change in the awareness of planning-evaluation strategies used by the students. Contrary to the researchers' hypothesis, the study found that the lowest-proficiency student demonstrated an increase in the use of mental translation strategies after a one semester's listening course, a result g Vandergrift's (1997b) finding.
This study set a fine example of using mixed method approaches for both qualitative and quantitative data so as to achieve insight into students' listening prehension strategies and the developitive awareness in listening. While the MALQ provided a quantitative measure, additional qualitative data such as interviews and notes helped to give a fuller understanding of students' responses on the MALQ. However, the findings of the study cannot be generalized as the sasisted of only four students (due to class absence, only three participants pleted the MALQ).
Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari (2010) carried out an eigate the effects of a itive, process-based approach to teaching 106 FSL (French as a second language) university-level students L2 listening over a semester. The experio texts using a methodology that led learners through the itive processes, whereas the same texts were taught to the control group without any guided attention to listening processes. A listening test was administered at the beginning and the end of the study, and the developudents' itive knowledge about listening was measured using the MALQ (Vandergrift et al., 2006) at the beginning, middle, and end points of the study, immediately after a listening activity. Results demonstrated that the group receiving the ruction significantly outperfortrol group on thefinaltest of listening prehension, and the less skilled listeners in the experimental group made greater gains than their more skilled peers in the group. The study also provided evidence of a growing awareness of the itive processes underlying suessful L2 listening.
A recent study by Coskun (2010) investigated the effect of rategy training on the listening performance of forty beginning-level students at a preparatory school of a Turkish university. The students were divided into an experitrol group (twenty students in each group). Each listening task in the experimental group followed the “CALLA strategy training model” (Chamot & O'Malley, 1994), i. e., preparation, presentation, practice, evaluation and expansion. The rategies eening instruction included planning, monitoring, evaluation and proble strategies. As a strategy training instrument, the MALQ designed by Vandergrift et al. (2006) was utilized to keep the students' rategy awareness fresh throughout the training and to help them to use, identify and develop learning strategies in a systematic way. Two listening cos were administered at the beginning and end of the training as the pre-test and posttest. Both tests were designed to be similar to the listening activities in which the strategy training was embedded. The first part of the tests was guessing about the main topic of the text after listening to only the beginning of the recording. The second part of the tests required the students to listen to the entire text and answer some related s showed a significant difference in the posttest sores in favor of the experi thus concluded that the rategy training facilitated L2 listening prehension.
Though the last two studies reviewed above involved listening coacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), no atteigate the relationship between students' listening proficiency and their ening awareness. To the author's knowledge, there has been no study carried out to date investigating the relationship between learners' listening proficiency and their ening awareness, in spite the MALQ could be utilized in this way.
Findings from above the studies have indicated that ruction in listening can be beneficial. Goh (2008) sus of ruction in the following ways:
1. It i listening, helping learners to be , more motivated and less anxious;
2. It has a positive effect on listening perford
3. Weak listeners potentially benefit the greatest from it. ()
The qualitative studies reviewed above point to the promise of a strategy-based approach to teaching L2 listening. Although the results from these studies have been encouraging, most of the studies involved very small samples. Except for Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari's study in 2010, the samples in most of the studies were under 20. Thus their results are not generalizable.
Another issue is how to best utilize the MALQ. Besides using it as a tool to describe or assess changes in learner ing fro (as in O'Bryan & Hegelheimer, 2009; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010; and Coskun, 2010), quantitative data collected fro be correlated with the participants' listening test scores. By presenting correlations between listening proficiency and itive awareness, studies in this area can exahe relationship between different listening strategies and listening prehension, which is a purpose of the present research.