In addition to implementing metacognitive skills instruction in Phase I, my focus had been on learning more about metacognition in L2 listening and how to conduct listening lessons. Having gained more experience, I was able to plan Phase II with greater precision and accuracy. The Listening Focus lessons had been difficult to implement and I was not able to fully utilize all the data I collected. From what I had learned, I decided to adjust the Listening Focus lessons to support student awareness of metacognitive strategies for listening. Further, I limited my data collection to observations, notes, and a final administration of the MALQ.
Originally, I planned to have at least eight lessons in my action research project, with four lessons in each phase. Understandably, adjustments had to be made to accommodate other course objectives and the lessons were pushed back by about three weeks. As a result, I had only three weeks to complete all of Phase II. This was not ideal. The short time frame made it difficult to adequately implement some of the changes to the listening lessons that I had hoped to add. However, I decided to prepare a strong intervention with the time available based on what I had learned in the previous lessons.
Understanding my content area and students better allowed me to return to the L2 listening and metacognitive skills literature with an enriched perspective. I found that the listening task sequence was in alignment with the research on guided listening practice which fosters automatization of metacognitive processes through repeated application of strategies (Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010). However, the adjustments I had made to my initial plan in response to time constraints had reduced the amount of explicit guidance I provided during instruction. According to Goh (2008), an important feature of the pedagogical cycle is that learners gain an awareness of the listening process through guidance from the teacher and more skilled peers. I felt that it could be beneficial to students to provide more explicit guidance during the listening lessons in order to raise their awareness of the listening process and use of metacognitive skills. In order to accomplish this, I adjusted the Listening Focus lessons and created three components for my Phase II intervention: clarifying the structure of the lessons and the purpose for each task, making the listening process more explicit, and drawing explicit attention to strategies students were using or could try.
The first change that I made for Phase II was designing an outline for the listening notes. My mentor teacher and practicum supervisor both suggested that this would reduce the cognitive load of the lesson and allow students to focus on listening. It also had the potential to speed up the lesson since some students needed time to copy questions and instructions into their notes during Phase I. In the outline I included changes in the Listening Focus task sequence to reflect strategies students were demonstrating during the lessons. For example, I changed the instructions for the first listening and adjustment stages from directing students to take notes to allowing students to choose to listen only or take notes depending on which method they felt worked best for them. For the students who preferred focusing only on listening during the initial, the first adjustment would give them a chance to review their predictions, make adjustments, and outline what information they would write in their notes during subsequent listenings. The outline also included an expanded version of the reflection questions. I noticed that some students had only partially answered the questions or occasionally skipped them. I could not be certain whether skipping the questions meant that those students had not reflected or that they did not want to write their reflections. In either case, I hoped that the changes would support their reflective process:
While the general Listening Focus task sequence remained the same, each component I planned for Phase II focused a on specific area of awareness. For the first lesson, I planned to introduce the changes of Phase II and use the notes outline to review each of the tasks and their purpose. The length of the listening segment for that lesson was quite long and with the changes to the Listening Focus notes and the increased time on each step, I chose to only make these changes.
For the second lesson, I prepared a “think-aloud” in which I would verbalize what I was thinking as I went through each task in the listening sequence with the students. For instance, when viewing the title of the listening segment, which was “A Student Presentation,” I would say what I was thinking that this meant for my preparation process:
In addition, I planned to ask students to practice a similar think-aloud protocol with their partner to finish their predictions. During the adjustment phase, I planned to elicit a problem from the class, then provide some options for a solution. Students would then try to do the same thing with a partner for additional points of confusion from the listening segment. And finally, I planned to have several students who had different note-taking strategies share their notes and why they used their particular style. While this was not directly related to metacognitive listening skills, note-taking had become a major focus in the lessons. Some students seemed completely derailed by the difficulty of taking notes – particularly on exams when they received grades for style, length, and content. I hoped that by presenting other options, I would help them to approach incorporating that aspect of the listening tasks strategically as well. An additional support for notes was adding abbreviations to the vocabulary review/preview. This way students could be thinking about how they would write words in shortened forms prior to taking notes. The mentor teacher also began providing this support through the vocabulary worksheets and lessons.
For the third component of the intervention, I planned to focus on making the metacognitive strategies more explicit. I had noticed that in their notes, at least half of the students identified “focusing more” or “listening more carefully” as their goal for the next listening. Although directed and selective attention are important metacognitive listening skills, Goh (2008) points out that “listening harder” and “practicing harder” are often the only coping strategies less-strategic listeners know and may not actually help them become more successful listeners (p. 191). I realized that I had not provided enough support for students’ in this area and so a more explicit description of strategies was necessary in helping raise student awareness of their listening processes. This was the most difficult aspect of the intervention for me to prepare. I had learned much more about what students did and did not understand about their listening process. It seemed that modeling and doing a think-aloud would again be an appropriate way to present the information that had a good chance of being accessible. I planned to work on the adjustment stages together as a class. I would elicit information on the main ideas of the listening segment from the students in the first adjustment stage, writing exactly what they could report down to the detail of spelling. Then we would review discrepancies, areas that were still confusing, or places where we were unable to reconstruct the information from the text. I would elicit the questions we needed to ask and how we needed to focus in the next listening, then ask students to suggest ways to prepare. I planned that as we listening again, I would ask students to mark off the information they were listening for in their notes, as I made changes to the group notes on the board (e.g. circling the right answer of two, adjusting numbers or other points of difference). At each point, I would ask students what we were doing and how it might be helpful. I was hoping that students would be able to understand why these tasks were useful and how they might keep applying them in other listening contexts.
Figure 10. Phase II listening lesson listening segments showing the sequence, type of listening content, time and topic.
Assessments
I was able to continue the data collection from Phase I, except the interviews. Due to the shortened time-frame for my action research project, I did not have time to conduct and analyze the data following the completion of Phase II. From each lesson, I would have observation data and listening notes, with a final administration of the MALQ at the end of the last Listening Focus lesson.
The questionnaire would be my only measure of whether student awareness had increased. From the listening notes, I hoped to analyze how successfully the notes outline supported students’ predictions and reflections. If my prediction was correct, students would have more time to focus on writing their responses rather than copying down the questions or reading the PowerPoint.