Indonesian College Listeners’ Metacognitive Awareness Strategies

Abstract

Listening is one of the skills that learners should master in language learning, along with speaking, reading, and writing. The appropriate strategies are needed to reach the expected goal, especially in listening comprehension. The important part of helping learners to be more effective and, importantly, more autonomous is to develop metacognitive awareness, which is related to the strategies used to comprehend the listening skills. This study is intended to find out the metacognitive listening strategies that listeners use to face the difficulties in the process of listening, and the way they engage in using the metacognitive strategies. This thesis is conducted by using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The researcher collect the data using a quantitative data instrument, which is MALQ (Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire) to acquire learners knowledge about the strategy used. Then followed up by interviewing a subset of the participants to learn more detailed information about the way they engage in using the metacognitive strategies, and providing a more thorough understanding of the results. Based on the results, the metacognitive strategy that is mostly used by the participants is “problem solving” than other types of strategy. Then, followed by “directed attention”, “planning and evaluation”, “mental translation”, and the last strategy that is rarely used is “person knowledge”. In addition there are 43 participants who have filled the questionnaire. 20 persons had the high level of metacognitive listening strategies, 23 persons had the medium level, and zero person in low level of metacognitive listening strategies. It can be concluded that the participants are aware and have used the effective strategies to overcome their difficulties in listening comprehension. Moreover, they engaged in using metacognitive strategies in many ways. Based on the results of interview, participants reported that using experiences, knowledge, understanding the idea and the context to help them comprehend the meaning of the words they didn’t know as the “problem solving” strategy they used. As for “directed attention” strategy, they more likely remove distractions around them, in order to be more effective in listening what the speaker are saying. In “planning and evaluation they tend to prepare the material that will be discussed in class by learning the certain topic and increasing vocabulary by listening to something in English. All the participants tend to translate in mind as they listen, as “mental translation” strategy. The last one is “person knowledge”. In this case, all the participants thought that listening is a challenge because of many factors, such as source’s word or terms, new phrase, topic, text type, context, or pronunciation which they may not have heard of before.