Egyptian EFL students attitudes and perceptions as precursors of the success/failure of using podcasts as a means of aural input in a metacognitive awareness raising strategy training programme, with particular reference to listening

Listening plays a quintessential role in learning and communicating in a second language. Nevertheless, Egyptian English as Foreign (EFL) learners, due to several challenges that constrain the teaching of listening in Egypt, perceive listening as a difficult skill to be learnt. Hence, the current study has aimed to investigate the impact of metacognitive strategy training on raising Egyptian EFL learners’ metacognitive awareness while listening to podcasts. Data were collected through the participation of eighty-three undergraduate students at a private university in Egypt who filled out the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) (Vandergrift et al., 2006) over three points of time. Students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the metacognitive strategy training were explored through their writing of listening journals and their participating in focus group interviews. The findings of this research provide evidence that the metacognitive strategy training via the implementation of the metacognitive pedagogical sequence enabled participants to evaluate the metacognitive knowledge they employed while listening, assess its effectiveness, and modify it accordingly if it was impeding their listening abilities and their potential to become autonomous learners. Furthermore, the metacognitive awareness raising training had a positive effect on raising learners’ metacognitive awareness though this improvement has been minimal. The paper discusses the results of the analysis of the MALQ as well as the grouping of the factors such as the metacognitive pedagogical sequence, characteristics of the podcasts, collaboration with peers, writing reflections and practising out-of-classroom activities that contributed to the positive perceptions of the learners of the metacognitive awareness raising training. Pedagogical implications for teaching are discussed, along with limitations of the study and suggestions for future research.