Listening Skills Development in Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language and The Usage of Metacognitive Strategies

Abstract

The aim of this study is to determine the state of using metacognitive strategies to develop listening skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language to Syrian children. This research is a descriptive study designed with the survey method. In June 2017, the Certification Program for Teaching Turkish as a Foreign Language was organized for Turkish educators who work in Adana, as a part of “The Project of Supporting Syrian Children’s Integration into the Turkish Education System”. In this context, all Turkish educators who work in Adana composed the population of this study while 108 Turkish educators constituted the sample of the study. In this study, the data were collected by the “Metacognitive Listening Strategies Opinion Form” developed by the researcher and analyzed with descriptive statistical techniques. The findings of the study showed that most of the metacognitive strategies that can be used before listening are rarely used and that the response rates as to “always” or “often” in the questionnaire are quite low. It was observed that Turkish educators usually “rarely” used strategies apart from the strategy of “underlining words the meaning of which they do not know” in the listening process.The findings further indicated that more strategies were used before and after listening than during listening and that the most frequently used strategies by learners were summarizing the listening text in their own words, expressing the theme and main idea of the text they were listening to, telling which section/s in the listening text they mostly focused on, and answering the listening comprehension questions.