Investigating metacognitive strategy awareness for multimodal listening

When we listen to human discourse, we do this in a context which may include the words themselves, tone of voice, stress on words, as well as gestures, visual context, facial expressions and interpersonal distance, which work to produce a multimodal message. The development of listening skills then implies focussing not only on audio input but also on all types of non-verbal input. This article describes a case study of a university listening paper where 12 predominantly English as a second language participants filled out a widely recognised pre and post Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire consisting of 21 questions. Seven additional questions were added to the questionnaires that related to multimodal aspects of listening. Four of the research participants were also involved in in-depth interviews. Findings indicate the following three main themes relating to student perceptions: that metacognitive listening strategies help their listening; that the teacher has an important role in teaching strategies and selecting listening material; and that overall, video material is more useful than audio material alone for the development of listening comprehension.