An exploratory study on the relationship between motivation types, metacognitive awareness, and EFL listening proficiency

Even if listening plays a crucial role in both daily life and language learning process, it is generally underestimated by language teachers. It is usually considered as a means to be used while grammar and other language skills are taught. Thus, language learners do not receive enough support about how to control the process of listening. That is why it is significant to focus on listening skill and provide insight into it. This study explores the relationships between the motivation types, the metacognitive awareness and the listening proficiency of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. Additionally, the study examines whether gender and year in school (freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors) affect the motivation types, the metacognitive awareness and the listening proficiency of EFL learners. The participants were 240 Turkish undergraduate students majoring in English Language Teaching (ELT) at Dokuz Eylül University. They completed two scales and a listening proficiency test: The Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) (Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, and Tafaghodtari, 2006), the Language Learning Orientations Scale (LLOS) (Noels, Pelletier, Clément, and Vallerand, 2000), and the listening section of the TOEFL. First, the listening section of TOEFL was applied to the participants in group sessions at classrooms by the researcher. Immediately after the administration of the listening test, the MALQ and the LLOS were conducted. The analysis revealed a significant positive relationship between learners' metacognitive awareness scores and listening performance. Moreover, listening performance was associated positively with more self-determined forms of motivation (intrinsic motivation and its types), but negatively with less self-determined forms of motivation (amotivation, external regulation, and introjected regulation). Although correlations were not as high as expected, intrinsically motivated students had more tendency to utilize problem solving, directed attention, and planning and evaluation strategies than extrinsically motivated and amotivated learners. Key words: Listening, metacognitive awareness, metacognitive strategies, motivation types, self-determination theory.