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Article published In: Perspectives on Chinese Language Acquisition
Edited by Henghua Su
[International Journal of Chinese Linguistics 12:2] 2025
► pp. 242–255

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The effect of metacognitive instruction on Singapore secondary students’ Chinese listening performance and metacognitive awareness

 | Nanyang Technological University
Published online: 6 October 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijchl.00038.zha
Abstract
This article reports on a study of metacognitive instruction for Chinese learners in Singapore secondary classrooms. Participants were 262 students in a Singapore secondary school who learn Chinese as their mother tongue language. They were instructed with an adapted version of the Metacognitive Awareness of Listening Questionnaire (Vandergrift, L., Goh, C. C. M., Mareschal, C. J., & Tafaghodtari, M. H. (2006). The Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire: Development and validation. Language Learning, 56 (3), 431–462. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) on the use of metacognitive strategies while doing Chinese listening exercises. It was found that students’ performance in listening comprehension was improved significantly. Their Planning & Evaluation and Directed Attention gained significant improvement as well. Findings from this study will provide verification for previous research results. More importantly, they are expected to give implications for the teaching and learning of listening comprehension in Chinese as a second language.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Metacognitive awareness in L2 listening comprehension
    • 2.2Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ)
    • 2.3Relevant MALQ studies about instruction of metacognitive awareness
    • 2.4Research questions
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2The listening course
    • 3.3Instruments
    • 3.4Data collection and analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Descriptive statistics
    • 4.2Confirmatory factor analysis
    • 4.3ANCOVA
    • 4.4T-test
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Effects on listening performance
    • 5.2Effects on metacognitive awareness
  • 6.Conclusions
  • References
References (32)
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