Fostering metacognitive listening strategies in an EFL classroom at Luigi Pirandello school.

Abstract

The project was developed at Luigi Pirandello School, arose from the listening comprehension problems that the students from eighth grade had in English due to the listening skill was not practiced inside the classroom. As a consequence, they did not understand the main ideas or specific information in conversations generating lack of motivation to work this one. Therefore, the researchers designed and put into practice an action plan that could help the participants to improve the listening skill in English. As far the methodology concerned, this study was mixed and carried out with nineteen students from eighth grade who participated in six implementations where the Metacognitive Pedagogical Sequence approach was applied by the researchers using the Vandergrift and Goh (2012) work as well as pre-while and post listening activities with the aim to identify if the Metacognitive strategies contributed to the improvement of the listening skill. In brief, the data collected through the pre and posttest, focus groups and reflective journals made by the researchers which indicated that the participants definitely improved their listening skill by making predictions taking into account what they have learnt from the language and the experiences developing a reflective process in which they noticed their weakness and strengths as listeners. Hence, they could work on those ones in each section or at home to identify their progress on the listening comprehension.