Development of Foreign Language Listening Comprehension Through Metacognitive Strategies and Podcasts

ABSTRACT: Drawing on a socio-cognitive approach and focusing on the concepts of listening comprehension and listening metacognitive strategies, this case study explored the impact that the use of metacognitive strategies-based tasks with podcasts and portable players for listening tasks had with a group of EFL adolescent learners. The study was conducted with 32 students from a public school in Medellin, Colombia. The researcher planned and designed an intervention using the metacognitive strategy instruction model proposed by Vandergrift (2004). Data were collected from an online questionnaire, students’ reflections, the MALQ questionnaire and an interview. The results showed that the use of metacognitive strategies had a positive impact on the students’ listening comprehension skill, and that the use of metacognitive strategies developed the students’ metacognitive awareness about their listening process. The results also evidenced that the podcasts’ characteristics like duration, speech rate, and portability motivated its use, helping students to improve their listening comprehension. Additionally, the podcasts challenged students’ to identify new vocabulary and to recognize other accents because they were exposed to listen to authentic materials