Relationships among motivation orientations, metacognitive awareness and proficiency in L2 listening

This paper examines the relationships among motivation, metacognition, and proficiency in listening comprehension. Adolescent learners of French (N=57) completed two questionnaires. A motivation questionnaire tapped student responses to three orientations related to motivation: amotivation, intrinsic, and extrinsic. A metacognitive awareness questionnaire tapped the metacognitive strategies students reported using when listening to authentic texts in French. Student responses on both instruments were correlated to determine any possible relationship between the three types of motivation and the metacognitive listening strategies. Responses to the motivation questionnaire were also correlated with listening proficiency, as determined by a listening comprehension test. As hypothesized, students reporting a greater use of metacognitive strategies also reported more motivational intensity, with some evidence of a self-determination continuum evident in the response patterns. Listening proficiency correlated negatively with amotivation; however, correlations with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were not as high as anticipated. The results of this study provide some empirical support for the hypothesized links between self-determination theory, self-regulated learning, learner autonomy, and metacognition.