An Empirical Study on the Relation between Meta-cognitive Strategies and Listening Autonomous Learning Ability

Meta-cognition refers to learners' autonomous awareness of their own mental process and the ability to reflect, control, evaluate and regulate their own cognitive process. Influenced by traditional teaching mode, college students are always lack of the ability of autonomic learning and of learning methods. We should foster their consciousness of meta-cognition using meta-cognition strategy, help them make a planning and improve self-supervision ability and self-evaluation ability. A great number of studies show that meta-cognition strategies provides the learners the proper guidance in English listening and can be acquired by training. Thus, we think that meta-cognition is the most crucial to further improve learners' listening autonomous learning ability. Based on the essence of meta-cognition theory and the characteristics of college English teaching, the cultivation of students' meta-cognition is favorable for the improvement of their ability to learn English listening autonomously. In students' listening autonomous learning, we should strengthen the training of meta-cognition. This paper analyzes and discusses the relationship between meta-cognitive strategies and English listening autonomous learning ability referring to the statistics and results from the empirical study of meta-cognition strategies training on 60 non-English major students. Results also showed that meta-cognition strategies training contributed to autonomous listening behaviors. Recommendations for further research are discussed.