The Impact of the Podcast (BBC Sounds) to Raise Metacognitive Awareness in Developing L2 Listening Comprehension among Bangladeshi Undergraduate Learners

Abstract

Drawing on Vandergrift's (2006) metacognitive awareness-raising listening questionnaire and podcast technology to expedite undergraduate L2 listening comprehension, this study explored whether podcasts helped learners develop listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness. The purpose of this study is to examine a) does a podcast, 'BBC sounds', play a role in improving learners' listening comprehension, and b) to what extent do listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness help learners improve learning? To apprehend the research objectives, twenty Bangladeshi undergraduate EFL learners in the experimental group (n = 10) and the control group (n = 10) attended the intervention for five weeks during the COVID- 19 pandemic. Participants of the experimental group received metacognitive instruction accompanying five transactional listening texts from the podcast BBC Sounds and performed on the worksheets based on the pedagogical sequence for listening instruction designed by Vandergrift and Goh (2012). Simultaneously, control group participants attended the same podcast texts but the traditional product-based approach and performed the worksheets with comprehension questions. Both groups attended pre-test, post-test, and two metacognitive awareness listening questionnaires (MALQ) before and after the intervention. The quantitative method of research embodied the notion of triangulation for this study. Using one-way within-subject ANOVA, the results revealed a positive correlation (r = 0.63) between metacognitive awareness and L2 listening comprehension, which accounted for the total variance in the data. This study implied that podcasts twinned with metacognitive instruction could help learners develop L2 listening in terms of decoding and meaning- building processing by raising their metacognitive awareness and be used by teachers to guide them to learn to listen systematically.