The Effect of Activating Metacognitive Strategies on the Listening Performance and Metacognitive Awareness of EFL Students

This study investigates the effect of activating metacognitive strategies on the listening performance of English as a foreign language (EFL) university students and explores the impact of such strategies on their metacognitive awareness of the listening task. The participants were N = 50 students of English literature at the state university of Qom, Iran. After screening the participants from among 60 students, they were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The experimental group (n = 25) received the metacognitive strategy instruction based on the models proposed by Vandergrift and Tafaghodtari (2010), while the control group (n = 25) received just the listening input with no strategy instruction. The listening module of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) was utilized to evaluate the listening performance of the participants in both groups in pretests and posttests, and the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) instrument was applied to measure the metacognitive awareness of the treatment group before and after the treatment. The results of the IELTS test revealed that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on the posttest and according to the analysis of the MALQ instrument there was a significant improvement in the students’ level of metacognitive awareness after strategy instruction. The interview results in the discussion section also supported the findings and shed more light on the details.     

Measures of information for maximum ranked set sampling with unequal samples

Biradar and Santosha (2014 Biradar, B. S., and C. D. Santosha. 2014. Estimation of the mean of the exponential distribution using maximum ranked set sampling with unequal samples. Open Journal of Statistics 4:641–49.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) proposed maximum ranked set sampling procedure with unequal samples (MRSSU) to estimate the mean of the exponential distribution. In this paper, we consider information measures of MRSSU in terms of Shannon entropy, Rényi entropy and Kullback-Leibler (KL) information. We also compare the uncertainty and information content of MRSSU with simple random sampling and ranked set sampling data. Finally, we develop some characterization results in terms of cumulative entropy and failure entropy of MRSSU.