Metacognitive listening strategies and note-taking for EFL writing efficiency

Abstract EN

Students' written production at exams is a major concern to teachers.

To prepare for exams, students refer principally to their notes and to hand-outs, hence, the quality of the notes and the conditions of note-taking ought to be examined.

Learning strategies have been acknowledged as aids to learning and the use of metacognitive strategies are considered to be helpful to the development of cognitive ones.

We therefore adopted an integrated skills perspective to provide metacognitive listening strategies instruction and modeling to 66 third year EFL students at Annaba Badji at Mokhtar University, in the module of oral expression and listening comprehension and also, in the module of neuroscience that was previously taught at the department of English in that university, to improve note-taking in order to reach a greater efficiency in writing.

The results obtained confirmed to a great extent our hypothesis that an explicit metacognitive listening strategy instruction and modeling of the strategy raised students awareness about their capacities and their difficulties and helped them develop a reflexive behaviour about their learning habits which resulted in more pertinent notes.