Academic listening skill is an indispensable necessity for English for academic purposes (EAP) students in English-medium universities and also critical for their future success in comprehending conference lectures. But due to the specific nature of such academic lectures, nonnative students all too often face challenges in getting a full command of this task. This study investigates the challenges of listening to academic lectures and the impact of related metacognitive strategies on academic lecture listening comprehension on a group of Iranian learners in an EAP workshop. Fifteen academic staff who took part in two intact classes at the University of Qom, Iran, were randomly assigned to treatment (N = 8) and control (N = 7) groups. The treatment group received 16 hr of metacognitive strategy instruction based on the models proposed by Vandergrift during academic listening instruction, while the control group was just exposed to academic lectures with no explicit strategy instruction. The academic listening sections of the British International English Language Testing System (IELTS) were utilized to measure the listening comprehension of both groups before and after the treatment. The results of the data analysis determined that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in the listening posttest. The interviews before and after the treatment revealed details of challenges in academic lecture comprehension and also shed light on the perception of the learners regarding metacognitive strategy instruction and the frequency of main metacognitive strategies used in comprehending academic lectures.
Metacognitive strategy instruction (MetSI) has been shown to have a strong impact on various aspects of English as a second/foreign language instruction. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of MetSI on the improvement of listening selfefficacy among English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners. A group of sixty female undergraduate learners of English literature at a state-run university in Iran consented to take part in this study. After homogenizing the participants' English proficiency level using a sample section of the British Council IELTS test, 40 learners were selected whose English proficiency fell within intermediate to upperintermediate level. A listening self-efficacy questionnaire (borrowed from Rahimi and Abedini, 2009) was used to measure the participants' level of listening selfefficacy in the pre and post-test phases of the study. The participants were randomly assigned to treatment (n=20) and control (n=20) groups. The treatment group received 8 hours of MetSI during eight sessions based on the model proposed by Vandergrift (2003) while the control group didn't receive any explicit MetSI. The control group received the usual training in listening instead.
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