Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies in Foreign Language Listening Comprehension at The Studies of Tourism – Students’ Preference and University Lecturers’ Utility Rating

Abstract

Being the primary channel of incoming information in spoken communication, listening comprehension is one of the key skills of the second language acquisition to be mastered. Since it is a complex concept implying different types of knowledge, it is assumed nowadays that improving strategic behaviour of students would lead to a more efficient use of listening comprehension. Thus, the aim of the present study is to gain the insight into the strategic behaviour of the freshmen university students through testing cognitive and metacognitive strategy preferences. Moreover, the study included strategy utility rating by university lecturers. The study employed a questionnaire to draw data that were processed by means of mathematical statistics and utility value analysis, whereas the use of Pareto analysis pointed to the set of preferable strategies. The results obtained in the study testify to rather uniform preference ascribed to listening comprehension cognitive and metacognitive strategies by skilled and less skilled first-year university students. On the other hand, the results obtained by university lecturers are consistent with the current literature on the issue. Thus, the set of desirable strategies points to the cognitive strategies of linguistic inferencing, global prediction and academic and world elaboration, i.e. metacognitive strategies of monitoring, directed attention and evaluation as those contributing most to efficient listening comprehension.