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Abstract
Listening is an important language and literacy skill yet it remains a somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect in many of our primary school classrooms. Teaching listening is almost non-existent usually taking the form of exposure to listening comprehension practice in the hope that young learners will somehow get better at it. Although in some instances methods to aid listening development are taught, these tend to involve instructional approaches or techniques to deal with the complexities of the listening tasks rather than focusing on the listening processes involved. This article uses introspections gathered in listening diaries from a group of young learners to reveal metacognitive knowledge they had. Knowledge they possessed mostly revolved around the listening tasks that they were dealing with and how to cope with the challenges of those listening tasks. This article argues for the development of metacognitive knowledge (person, task and strategic knowledge) as part of the processes of teaching listening in order for listening growth to take place. Implications drawn highlight how listening should be taught to young learners rather than just tested with suggestions given on activities that can be incorporated into the classrooms to allow for metacognitive knowledge enhancement to take place.
Keywords: Listening Comprehension, Metacognitive Knowledge, Pedagogical Recommendations, Young Learners
Listening is an extremely important skill for young learners and it is believed to take up about 50% of their classroom time (Tompkins, 2002). Twenty years ago Mendelson (1994, p. 9) asserted that "the teaching of listening comprehension remains a somewhat neglected and poorly taught aspect of English in many ESL programmes - the 'Cinderella' skill of ESL." The situation remains largely the same in 2014. Why is this so?
Listening in Singapore's primary schools is given very little emphasis and many young learners are seldom taught specific methods to deal with it. In many of the listening lessons in school, teachers typically switch on the audio recorder while students fill in a worksheet as they listen to a recorded segment. Once the recording is over, teachers go through the answers of the listening activity with these learners. Wrong answers to certain items are greeted by typical teacher responses such as "Listen, listen carefully next time!", "Listen, listen harder!" or "Weren't you listening?" which do...