Abstract： To date, a plethora of studies have shown significant correlations between metacognitive awareness and L2 listening achievement and MALQ, a self-report measure developed and validated by Vandergrift et al. (2006), has been widely used to gauge their relationships. However, the findings of relevant studies are incongruent. To bridge this gap, this paper used the software of CMA (2.0) and the metafor package for R to conduct a meta-analytic review of 39 primary studies involving 7997 participants from home and abroad. 182 effect sizes extracted from 47 independent samples were aggregated and analyzed. According to the more field-specific benchmarks of effect sizes proposed by Plonsky and Oswald (2014), the results of the meta-analysis indicate medium correlations between metacognitive awareness (r = 0.38), problem solving (r = 0.35) and L2 listening achievement while directed attention (r = 0.27), planning and evaluation (r = 0.22), person knowledge (r = 0.21), and mental translation (r = -0.13) are found to be modestly or weakly associated with L2 listening achievement. Moderator analyses show that educational level and target language are the moderator variables that significantly impact the relationship between metacognitive awareness and L2 achievement. Pedagogical implications are discussed.
Key words: L2 listening achievement; metacognitive awareness; MALQ; meta-analysis; effect size
