2. Literature Review

In the past ten years, many expects studied about the relationship between the metacognitive awareness and L2 listening performance, so this part will introduce their studies and begin with the definition of the metacognitive awareness and L2 listening performance as well as the empirical studies.

2.1 Definition of Metacognitive Awareness

Metacognitive awareness is the most complex constructs, it refers to higher order thinking and includes active control over cognitive processes in learning. Anderson defined it as ”Thinking about thinking”. Without metacognitive awareness, students are left high and dry lacking any plan for how to start or monitor their performance and deprived of command over their achievements so that they lose future learning advantages (O#8217;Malley amp; Chamot, 1990). However, some language scholars believe that students#8217; listening skills have nothing to do with metacogitive awareness and it is associated with intelligence (O#8217;Malley amp; Chamot, 1990). In fact, learning may occur without metacognitive awareness, but it will gradually be fade away and will not lasting long times. According to John Flavell, metacogitive awareness is ”one#8217;s knowledge concerning one#8217;s own cognitive processes and products or anything related to them, and the capacity for active monitoring and consequent regulation and orchestration of this process in relation to the cognitive objects or data on which they bear, usually in some service of some concrete goal or objective.(p.233)

How to explore the correlations between the two variables was still a problem, now several recent studies which investigated metacogitive awareness about listening have made use of the MALQ as an instrument for eliciting learner#8217; knowledge about strategy use and demand from listening(Baleghizadeh amp; Rahimi, 2011; Bozorgian, 2012). John Flavell, the founder of the MALQ, divided metacogitive knowledge into five parts: problem-solving, planning and evaluation, mental translation, person knowledge and directed attention.

2.2 Metacogitive Awareness and L2 Listening

Metacogitive awareness, besides the basic definition, has two important components: knowledge about cognition and control of cognition. Thus encompassing the dimensions of knowing and doing. (John Flavell, 1979)

Drawing on Flavell#8217;s (1979) conception of metacognition, Vandergrift and Goh (2012) proposed a framework for L2 listening and posited that the latent features of metacognition are manifested in three ways: metacognitive experience, metacognitive knowledge, and strategy use. They applied the term ”metacognitive awareness” to refer broadly to these manifestations revealing a person#8217;s consciousness of personal thoughts and conscious actions. Besides the metacognitive experience and metacognitive knowledge, another important dimension of metacognitive awareness in this framework is the use of strategies, which can facilitate listening comprehension and help learners cope with listening difficulties. Strategy use is a conscious process involving recognition of a problem and requires conscious application of strategy knowledge. Listening strategies have been broadly categorized as cognitive, metacognitive, and social-affective based on their functions.

As we all known, L2 listening is a receptive skill, and although the listening strategy instruction hasn#8217;t received enough attention, the strategy instruction of listening task has been gradually focused by the scholars in the past few decades. Most of the listening strategy studies have been investigating patterns and strategies used by successful versus less successful learners in order to teach students ”learn to listen” instead of ”listen to learn”. Therefore, listening instructors have the responsibility of teaching students to take advantage of strategies rather than merely providing them with oral passages and testing them (Mendelsohn, 1995).

2.3 Empirical Studies