The Impact of Metacognitive Instruction on EFL Learners’ Listening Comprehension and Oral Language Proficiency

The aim of the current study was to examine the effect of metacognitive instruction on EFL learners’ metacognitive awareness of listening strategies, listening comprehension, and oral language proficiency. Fifty students of two upper-intermediate English courses participated in the study and were sampled as the experimental and control groups. For sixteen weeks the experimental group participated in metacognitive instruction of listening with the aim of promoting their metacognitive awareness of listening strategies while listening to oral texts. Meanwhile, the control group received listening instruction without any focus on strategies. The result revealed that, while controlling for students’ entry-level metacognitive awareness and English listening and speaking proficiency, the instruction heightened the experimental group’s metacognitive awareness significantly at the end of the experiment. Although a difference between the listening ability of the experimental and control groups was found, this difference did not reach the level of statistical significance. As hypothesized, a significant difference between the experimental and control groups’ speaking ability was found in favor of the experimental group.