The effects of students' meta-cognitive abilities and gender on the development of their foreign language skills

Abstract

This study of meta-cognitive abilities and their impact on the development of foreign language skills makes a significant contribution to research into foreign language teaching and learning in general. The study presented in this paper was carried out on a large sample of university students in Serbia, illustrating its relevance to this educational setting. The study looks at the use of metacognitive strategies 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 reported through self-assessment. Five out of nine elements of meta-cognitive strategy were found to be predictive of self-assessment of language skills. This finding supports the assumption that the use of meta-cognitive strategies is important in building language skills. However, the study failed to discover evidence of differences in learning strategy use between genders, since only one out of nine elements was found to be statistically significant. The study found a relationship between gender and students’ perception of their own language skills. Men scored higher than women on all four variables, which means they assessed their own language skills better than the women did. The pedagogical implications are to consider didactic instructions that would encourage students to identify a problem in foreign language learning and to realize the ways in which actions are regulated, which would lead to a solution of the problem.