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If you like you can also choose to comment on the article on metacognitive listening instruction for young learners. Please take into consideration the following points:
To what extent do you think the metacognitive instruction framework suggested in the article applicable and useful in teaching Turkish young learners EFL listening skills? Do you think it can be applied to adult learners as well? If so, how? What do you think of the success rate with adult learners? What are some of the challenges waiting for the EFL teachers in Turkey in implementing this kind of instruction?
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In the article; teaching strategies that learners can use to comprehend the listening text more easily and develop learners’ knowledge about the listening process are referred to as ‘metacognitive instruction’.
ReplyDeleteVandergrift (2002) showed that reflection on the processes of listening is effective. His study proved that cognitive activities sensitized the learners to listening processes and developed their metacognitive knowledge for young learners. In another study among adult learners, text-focused and metacognitive awareness-raising activities were used (Vandergrift 2003). The learners showed increased metacognitive knowledge and learner engagement.
Since listening can be a difficult and boring process, the duty of teachers is to make this process easier for learners by teaching them effective strategies of listening. By learning those effective strategies, learners can reduce language anxiety and builds confidence when approaching listening tasks. Young learners can benefit from the metacognitive instruction as much as adults do. However, they may need more instruction, practice and help to apply them since they have limited knowledge and they are in the period of cognitive development. Although they learn many kind of strategies that can be used while listening something, they may not be able to adopt the strategies to different listening tasks. For example they may think that note taking is helpful in all kind of listening tasks. So, beside teaching strategies, teachers should teach that not all strategies are appropriate for all tasks. For adult learners, metacognitive instruction can be easier and they have less difficulty while applying the strategies.
By focusing on person, task, and strategy knowledge, metacognitive instruction can raise learners’ awareness of the listening process. This can help them develop a range of skills and strategies for listening.
EFL learners have great difficulty in learning English. Acquiring reading, speaking, writing or listening skills is not so easy. Personally, I myself has great difficulty in EFL listenings and I think many students also have same problem. To overcome with this problem, there are some technique and solutions. Metacognitive instruction in listening is one of them which is proposed by C.Goh and Y. Taib. Metacognition is defined as one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes and products or anything related to them . . . active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of these processes in relation to the cognitive objects or data on which they bear, usually in the service of some concrete goal or objective. It is stated that it has two features: control aspects and knowledge about cognitive states which can be divided as person, task and strategy knowledge. Metacognitive instruction includes both training learners directly to employ relevant strategies as well as helping them increase their metacognitive knowledge. Goh gives some useful ideas on effective listening. She proposes developing person, task and strategy knowledge. She also tells that in post listening stage, teachers shouldn’t use information from listening stage. She proposes keeping listening diaries which focus on all aspect of metacognitive knowledge. Some other researches show that reflection on listening activities also increase students’ metacognitive development. In this article, in the research done, they also used reflection method, they asked students to write a reflection about their development in listening after eight sessions and asked them to tell other students what they had learnt about listening as well. By this way they increased their metacognitive knowledge. From this research it can be concluded that reflection increases their metacognitive knowledge and their confidence as well. One of the student states that ‘I have learnt to cope with listening comprehension. I have become
ReplyDeletemore conscious of what I think when I listen to the passage.’ This tells its effectiveness very well. By this way, students learn to attend to their mental process during listening and they don’t just focus on questions and answers, they also try to comprehend the listening passage itself. Teacher led discussions also help them raise their metacognitive awareness. So, they have control of their mental development and listening, they also develop confidence. It can also applied with adult learners. Actually it is more easy to apply it with adult learners as their background knowledge and comprehension skills are more developed when compared to young learners. They are more conscious about what’s going on and as they are more developed cognitively, I think will be more easy to apply them. lastly, in our country, it can used easily as well if teachers are well informed about this strategy, because before children we have to rise teachers’ awareness.
Emine EREN
ReplyDelete‘Meta-cognitive Instruction in Listening for Young Learners’
The subject of the article attracted my attention because the listening sessions in lessons make generally people nervous. Even in casual life, when we watch some movie in English or when we listen to English music, we do not completely catch all the words and understand it. When it comes to as class activity, normally it sets a kind of nervous environment. On the other hand listening for young learners is much more difficult and tough. In that point the subject of this article which is about listening in young learner classes seems interesting to me. The article focuses on the importance of meta-cognitive instruction in listening for young learners and explains the importance of listening process in the class. Meta-cognitive instruction which can be described as teaching the children be aware of person knowledge, task knowledge and strategy knowledge is mentioned in the article. Developing these three aspects of meta-cognitive knowledge helps the children assess themselves and choose the best strategies for their own learning, so giving them an opportunity to lower affective aspects of learning listening. Lastly, according to the results of the article, children are more successful in accomplishing the listening tasks after being trained about meta-cognitive knowledge.
As conclusion giving the young learners meta-cognitive knowledge helps them form their own strategies for learning listening to lower the affective aspects of learning listening, which is one of the important issues in teaching English to young learners as a foreign language. As prospective teachers, I think our students may be in any possible level or age, thus knowing their abilities, interests and features and possible solutions to possible problems would ease our job. The ways and steps for developing listening by using meta-cognitive instruction give us opportunity to use the examples and suggestions stated in this article in our future career.
Meta-cognitive refers to the instruction that elicits the knowledge of listening for the learner. In the article, the benefits of this kind of listening are argued. I believe that, when people know how to do or what to be careful about something, they will be more successful and we can say that thanks to meta-cognitive listening, pupils get a deeper knowledge related to listening. In Turkey, listening and speaking skills are generally ignored in state schools because ours is an exam oriented system and in the exam these skills are not included. As a result, English language teachers are not much qualified about listening skills, too. As this is the case, children just have the necessary grammar and give up the rest. However, this should not be the case. It is a fact that students will have difficulty in listening because if we think about the accents in Turkey, we can be sure that even in the same country; we may not understand all the things uttered by other people. There are existing rules and abbreviated forms and it is impossible that our learners know and understand them easily. We can succeed this by raising the awareness of the students, which can be realized with the help of meta-cognitive listening instruction. If we teach the skills and strategies about understanding the listening texts better, they will eventually have better listening skills because they will be more conscious this time and know hat they are looking for. This method can also be applied with the adult learners because any language learner needs to have some understanding about listening strategies. We cannot just make them listen to something once and answer all the questions. We need to give clues to language learners. When they know the strategies, they will know what they are looking for and their purpose will turn to be a concrete one rather than being abstract.
ReplyDeleteAdult learners usually have more difficulty in language learning because they are over a certain age. It is true that they will have more knowledge related to the world and understand the text better sometimes. However, we should not forget the fact that, if someone does not know what s/he is looking for, it is inevitable that s/he will get lost. That’s why, we need to show the road and correct way to language learners whether they are young or adult learners. If they know about the processes, it will be easier because they will feel more relaxed and less stressful. They will be more confident, which in turn will help language learning.
However, in the implementation of this method, some problems may be confronted, as in every strategy. First of all, every learner may have his/her own way of listening to something and resist what we are trying to do. Then, we will need to explain the rationale behind what we are doing. Also, we need to be qualified to teach the meta-cognitive listening skills and right now there are not enough people qualified enough for this issue, I believe. This takes a long process to implement in the state schools, in which teachers already have difficulty with timing. Teachers and students usually complain about having much work to do in a limited time and it will be too hard for a teacher to implement this strategy in the classroom environment. Then, we will need to find some texts which ill appeal to the strategy type of different learners, which is also hard.
Sahura Ertuğrul
ReplyDeleteI always believe that it is too difficult to learn a language in a country in which the language is not spoken. It is because that learners have never had enough opportunity to be exposed to and use this language; that is, learners will be paralyzed both in receptive and productive skills. It can be said that the use of authentic material, classroom arrangement and the type of the language learning approach used in the class at least provide a real life environment. However, I want to ask that to what extend do students pretend as if they were in q restaurant or a hospital? Therefore, in foreign language learning classrooms, language becomes more logical and mathematical thing to be solved and understood rather than a natural tool to communicate. Like in the article, the learners need to be taught how they can develop, use and improve strategies to understand and learn this language.
Listening skill as a receptive skill is the most difficult one to be improved because there is no a natural environment to hear the language so it needs a lot of patience and effort to get used to the pace of the language, the intonation of the language and the nature of the language to be able to understand it while listening. Turkey is one of the countries which English is not spoken officially so the metacognitive instruction can be helpful for the learners in listening. The framework on the article (listen and answer, individual reflection, and self report and group discussion) is useful. I especially like the individual report and group discussion. Before I read the article, I had thought that teacher would lecture the students on the strategies found at the end of the study (direction attention, notice repetition, etc.) and then the learners would try to apply them. However, I saw that the framework was an exact opposite of my idea. I like it better in this way. In high school, we tried to apply my framework and it did not work well because that framework made the language machine like system and the lesson was boring because they did not mean anything to us before listening and so we made the listening tests as always we did. In the framework in article, the learners become aware of their knowledge and they create their own strategies and also share them with their friends. This framework can be applied in both young learners’ and adult learners’ classroom because it is like a keeping journal and get some life clues from it; it is not like a total lecture and it also offers an opportunity for self-learning and self assessment. However; the problem is time rather than framework. In a state school, there is only four- hour English lesson in a week, and two of them are for grammar, one for listening and speaking, and one for writing and reading. Therefore, in only one hour in a week, it is not possible to benefit from this framework. For this reason, I think this framework can be same but it can be adapted to the school. There is internet access almost everywhere so the listening and answer parts are done in the classroom, learners write their reflections on their individual journals at home and every week teacher gathers and write also feedback and useful tips for them, and for the group discussion, a class blog is opened and the learners share their reflections and teacher guides and controls them and finally every month in the class they discuss the most highlighted topics and improvements on the blogs. In this way, both time and framework are used effectively but too much duty waits for teachers because they need to keep both individual journals and blog control. There will be also communication problems to be dealt with. However; I think this is a good and helpful framework and it is not so impossible to apply it. With the mutual efforts of teachers and learners, Turkish learners can benefit from metacognitive instruction framework and improve their listening.
Rüveyda GÜNDÜZ
ReplyDelete1620129
REFLECTION ON “METACOGNITIVE INSTRUCTION IN LISTENING FOR YOUNG LEARNERS”
To start with, children have the capacity to distinguish between speech sounds. Before they understand what is said to them, they pay attention to rhythm and melody of the language. Namely, they attach meaning to the words after they interact and have a relationship with the people around them.
As listening is a receptive skill, it may be stressful for beginner language learners because they may have difficulty processing information quickly to understand what they are listening to. Learners may feel themselves anxious and frustrated because they can not figure out what is being said. Teachers play a very important role and have responsibility to improve such a difficult skill of learners because listening is a process which can not be observed. However; not only the teachers are responsible for developing such kind of a skill but the learners should also be active in their own process of listening development. Here appears a term which is metacognition. It is the self-awareness of one’s own cognitive processes. Teachers may provide the learners with the guidance to learn essential aspects, nature and demands of listening process. When the learners have information about these kinds of things related to listening, they can manage and evaluate their own learning much more easily. Of course, if the learner is not aware of his/her own listening process, his aimless state may prevent him/her from developing listening skills. Thus, learners should be given metacognitive instruction to help them have knowledge about what is going on during the listening process. I think, this instruction is of great importance because it may result in learners’ gaining self-autonomy which is very crucial in effective learning. The more the learners get self-autonomous, the more control they have over their own learning process. Metacognitive instruction is beneficial for learners to choose suitable strategies for developing their performance because it provides with person knowledge, task knowledge and strategy knowledge. Having such knowledge is very advantageous for learners because they don’t get lost during the listening process because they are aware of what they do or are going to do. When it comes to how metacognitive knowledge and awareness are increased, there are some activities which teachers may use for this purpose. The students may be given some comprehension questions after they have finished listening to understand whether they have some idea about listening passage. Then, they should be given the opportunity to reflect on and evaluate their own listening process. Reflection is a beneficial way for learners to develop their metacognitive skills. Discussions also provide children with the chance to see different kinds of ideas and evaluate their listening skills in accordance with those various notions. I think, it is of utmost importance that the students should be given the awareness of not just thinking about finding the correct answer while doing listening activities but trying to get the gist of the text and understand it much better.
REFLECTION ON METACOGNITIVE INSTRUCTIONS IN LISTENING FOR YOUNG LEARNERS
ReplyDeleteTeachers focus various skills during language teaching process one of which is listening. Listening activities in L2 teaching are stressful for all students. Teachers can adopt metacognitive instructions to deal with this problem as metacognitive instructions enable make the students be aware of their position. Also, metacognitive instructions lead the students to evaluate the progress they go through.
Metacognitive instructions may cause problems for young learners as “younger children are initially unable to utilize that knowledge spontaneously, giving rise to a gap between knowing and doing or production deficiency.” While adopting metacognitive instructions teachers should consider about cognitive development of the students. According to the article the adult learners are more successful than the young learners in terms of cognitive competence. It is easier to monitor and evaluate the adult learners as suggested in the article. So, teachers should be really careful while adopting the metacognitive instructions for the students of different age groups (adult vs. young learners)
Students’ phonetic and phonological knowledge develop beside metacognitive development. They are significantly related to the listening improvement. For this reason in listening activities these developments should be taken into consideration. To deal with these concerns teachers should integrate the technological devices and materials into the lessons. This would create shortcomings for the teachers in Turkey as the classrooms in Turkey are, mostly, poor technologically.
Eventually, teachers should consider the age (adult vs. young learners) of the students in terms of cognitive development while adopting metacognitive instructions. Integrating metacognitive instructions into the lesson plans will help teachers a lot in L2 teaching especially in teaching “listening.” As the teachers will be able to make the students be aware of their own improvement and develop their own strategies in this way, they will effectively involve the students in L2 activities, especially in listening activities.
Ahmet ÖZKAN
Using listening in the development of the children learning language is a good step in comprehending target language. This article took my attention and process because when learners become aware of the nature and demands of listening to another language, they will be in a better position to evaluate and manage their own learning as in the article. I personally have some problems learning reading, writing, speaking. Now, with this approach, it seems they will be easy for young learners to acquire the language effectively. The metacognitive listening instruction for young learners has a definition for as explained: In cognitive psychology, metacognition is defined as: one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes and products or anything related to them . . . active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of these processes in relation to the cognitive objects or data on which they bear, usually in the service of some concrete goal or objective.
ReplyDeleteMetacognitive instruction includes both training learners directly to employ relevant strategies as well as helping them increase their metacognitive knowledge. The approach has some beneficial ideas on effective listening. It can develop person, task and strategy knowledge. Goh tells that in post listening stage, teachers shouldn’t use information from listening stage. She proposes keeping listening diaries which focus on all aspect of metacognitive knowledge.
In Turkey, English is spoken as second language but not official language, so it may be problematic for people to find sources to learn the language. I think it is very useful through learning the language with metacognitive instruction. The framework on the article ‘listen and answer, individual reflection, and self report and group discussion’ is useful. In my opinion, individual report and group discussion is very beneficial for both adult and young learners in Turkey. When I was in secondary school, our teacher tried the framework of ‘just read and answer, write and repeat it many times’ and it did not work well because that framework made the language quite boring and the lesson was thrilling because the lesson has not audio or listening reinforcement at all.
METACOGNITIVE INSTRUCTIONS IN LISTENING FOR YOUNG LEARNERS
ReplyDeleteSecond language learning is extremely difficult if the learners have very little chance to hear and speak the language. EFL learners run into more challenges in listening and speaking than grammar and reading. While teaching to adults, using metacognitive instructions is helpful but what about young learners? The article gives information about this issue. It includes some studies which have been done with young learners. Their results show that giving the young learners metacognitive knowledge helps them a lot.
Giving young learners metacognitive knowledge is not suggested by some experts because of childrens’ cognitive developments. Children cannot understand abstract rules therefore teachers should be very careful while giving strategies. They should take into consideration students’ ages and levels. According to the research in the article, all the pupils perceived an improvement in their listening ability after the sessions. They attributed this improvement to their growing ability to manage the listening process. Students know what to do while listening and their frustration reduces. They become more confident therefore they can concentrate easily.
I chose this article because I am considering giving my students metacognitive knowledge about listening in the future. Listening is challenging for them so I can reduce their frustration with some practical strategy. Young learners can benefit from explicit teaching of strategies as much as adults. Reflection, discussion, teacher modelling, integrated sequences of activities that focus alternately on text and process are some ways of giving explicit strategies. I might apply these techniques and I can make clear everything for my students
I did not think that young learners would be able to have meta cognitive knowledge, that is, they could be able to assess and regulate themselves, have an awareness about their personal learning aspects that affect their learning. However, Flavell, Miller and, Miller's study 1993 proved otherwise. Teacher's modeling the students and thinking aloud about the steps and finally evaluating is a good and easily implementable idea as we know that modeling works very well on children and they will begin to do the same.
ReplyDeleteAnother study pointed out the importance of reflection and how it increased meta cognitive awareness of learners. Reflection, for me, is a very useful and invaluable kind of feedback and it is very effective. In classroom management, too, students are asked to list their misbehaviors, count them and try to reflect and monitor themselves and this works pretty well.
Adult learners, after the metacognitive listening activities reported increased metacognitive knowledge and learner engagement, and further commented on the motivational dimensions engendered by the success they experienced with this approach to listening. I think that adult learners will be more successful in this because they have higher thinking skills, abilities and much more awareness than the young learners as well as way wider span of attention.
By using this strategy, teachers can help students who evaluate themselves and report what goes wrong when they are engaging in listening activities, what they find difficult or missing.
The teacher can go over common problems and them help students individually for the other ones. I think it would be to-the-point and less time consuming and de-motivating because the students will both get feedback and get better as they receive help. Later, when they have learned to evaluate themselves and reflect, they can work on their problems on their own, too. This will decrease the work load of the teacher.
I think that this can be applied successfully both the young and adult learners when considered the data from relevant studies indicating that both parties reported increased awareness and success. I do not see why we cannot apply this to Turkish setting expect the lack of teachers' skills and knowledge in the area. Turkey considerably lacks in-service teacher education and teachers do not make research about the developments in the ELT. They cannot make use of any seminars or conventions for informing them because they think that it is a waste of time to attend them. They are already loaded with huge work with little money. Thus, like in Europe, these trainings should be a must for them and they should be rewarded when they attend. Teachers' competence and knowledge is very low in newly developed things and the main problem in applying this method and the obstacle the teachers will face is this.