Dear professors,
If I want to conduct a study for my doctoral thesis on the topic of the effects of metacognitive strategy instruction on EFL receptive skills (listening and reading skill) and metacognitive awareness of students, what are the appropriate research objectives related with my topic at a doctoral degree? Can I explore the relationship between listening skills and metacognitive awareness of listening as well as the relationship between reading skills and metacognitive awareness of reading which are all dependent variables?
Dear Peng,
As for the objectives of your PhD, you can address the questions you referred to. You can also explore the influence of mother tongue on developing listening skills in EFL. What are the obstacles that EFL learners encounter during listening due to differences between mother tongue and English? How can they be overcome? What are the difficulties students face while reading English because of ,for example, syntactic differences if there are any related to sentence structure? How can they be remidied?
Hello Changhong
David Nunan (1998) states that learning a second language is more like "growing a garden than building a wall" (Nunan, D. (1998). Teaching grammar in context. ELT Journal, 52 (2), 101-109), because students learn many things simultaneously but not systematically. You could put this statement as your research question, i.e., you could explore whether it is true that learning a second language is not systematic, but rather un-systematic. You could organize ESL sessions with students and investigate their level (or pattern) of L2 acquisition. Alternatively, your question could focus on "implicit learning", that occurs when learning takes place implicitly (Ellis 2009), i.e., students are not aware of their improved L2 skills, although they are able to reproduce the language to some extent. I hope that helps!
compare between effect of metacognitive strategies and the traditional ones, look to the suitability and appropriateness of different strategies and also the strength of the strategies through success achieved by the students
Dear Changhong Peng
If your question starts with 'what are the effects...', then you will have an experimental study.
If your question starts with 'what is the relation...', then you will have a correlational study.
Having said that, what is more convenient for you? Do you have time to implement a treatment in order to carry out an experimental study?
In case you decide to do that, you could choose a set of metacognitive strategies to teach to a group of students for some time and see the effect of that treatment on their comprehension (either reading or listening, or both). You also need to be specific regarding the task you will use. Then, you question would be something like:
'what are the effects of learning x and y metacognitive strategies on understanding main ideas?'
In this case, you would need to find out what metacognitive strategies have not been investigated yet, or what reading/listening tasks have not been investigated yet.
Here you need to have a control group, so it would be a between-subject design.
You could also conduct a correlational study to see whether students who are successful readers/listeners implement metacognitive strategies. Again, you would need to choose a specific task... understanding supporting details, for example. You would need some kind of measure of metacognitive strategies, like a questionnaire. Here you could have a within-subject design. So, your research question would be something like:
'what is the relation between understanding supporting details and the use of x and y metacognitive strategies in successful reading/listening comprehension?'
I hope this helps!
Best.
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