Metacognitive and social strategies to promote EFL learners’ lecture comprehension

Abstract EN

This study attempts to explore the challenges that influence academic lecture listening comprehension of Saudi EFL students.

Seventy-five students majoring in English participated in the diagnostic stage during which factors affecting lecture comprehension were elicited using a Likert scale questionnaire.

Participants are in the third and fourth year in the English program at King Khalid University and were doing content courses during the study.

In the next stage, 15 students underwent some intervention for 6 weeks where metacognitive and social strategies in teaching were incorporated.

The fifty-minute lecture was divided into three parts: 30 minutes for presentation and discussion of the lecture content, 10 minutes for peer discussion on the content and the last 10 minutes were allocated for a quiz on the lecture.

After this intervention, the participants were interviewed in a semi-structured setting where they were asked to reflect on the experiment.

The major findings of the study indicate that the factors that affect students’ listening comprehension pertain to teachers and teaching, students themselves, content of the courses and the program itself.

It is obvious from the data that the teaching methods followed are generally based on lecturing with less interaction, much of speed of delivery, variation in English accents used by teachers of different backgrounds, etc.

All these factors have contributed to a challenging learning environment where comprehension of lectures becomes a problem to EFL learners.

Therefore, the study findings recommend a paradigm shift in the teaching methods followed by instructors that focuses on metacognitive and social strategies as suggested in the experiment conducted by the researcher.

Furthermore, students’ linguistic and communication proficiency should be given special care.

In addition, training the EFL students in academic lecture listening comprehension strategies is highly recommended to be incorporated into the program design.