THE EFFECTS OF STUDENTS’ META-COGNITIVE ABILITIES AND GENDER ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR FOREIGN LANGUAGE SKILLS Cover Image

THE EFFECTS OF STUDENTS’ META-COGNITIVE ABILITIES AND GENDER ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR FOREIGN LANGUAGE SKILLS
THE EFFECTS OF STUDENTS’ META-COGNITIVE ABILITIES AND GENDER ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR FOREIGN LANGUAGE SKILLS

Author(s): Jelisaveta Šafranj, Aleksandra Gojkov-Rajić, Marina Katić
Subject(s): Education
Published by: Педагошко друштво Србије
Keywords: gender;meta-cognitive strategies;foreign language learning;language skills;

Summary/Abstract: This study of meta-cognitive abilities and their impact on the development of foreignlanguage skills makes a significant contribution to research into foreign language teachingand learning in general. The study presented in this paper was carried out on a large sample of universitystudents in Serbia, illustrating its relevance to this educational setting. The study looks at the use of metacognitivestrategies examined through the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) questionnaire(Oxford, 1990) as well as the effects of gender on the development of students’ language skills, as reportedthrough self-assessment. Five out of nine elements of meta-cognitive strategy were found to be predictiveof self-assessment of language skills. This finding supports the assumption that the use of meta-cognitivestrategies is important in building language skills. However, the study failed to discover evidence ofdifferences in learning strategy use between genders, since only one out of nine elements was found to bestatistically significant. The study found a relationship between gender and students’ perception of theirown language skills. Men scored higher than women on all four variables, which means they assessedtheir own language skills better than the women did. The pedagogical implications are to considerdidactic instructions that would encourage students to identify a problem in foreign language learningand to realize the ways in which actions are regulated, which would lead to a solution of the problem.

  • Issue Year: 67/2018
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 147-162
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: English
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