The Effectiveness of Blended Learning in Enhancing Students' Listening Comprehension and Metacognitive Listening Skills in Oman

Blended learning combines traditional face-to-face instruction with online learning and is becoming increasingly important in modern education. However, not many studies investigated its impact on students' listening comprehension and metacognitive listening skills in Oman. Therefore, this study aims to address this research gap. In this regard, a pretest-posttest design was implemented and a total of 27 grade 10 female Omani students were selected through a purposive sampling method. Two research instruments were used such as Oxford Online Placement Test to measure students' listening comprehension and metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire to check students' metacognitive listening skills. The intervention in this study consists of three blended learning lessons comprising: one face to face lesson, one online synchronous lesson and one online asynchronous lesson. After the treatment, students were given the posttest and the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire. Findings revealed that there was no significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores before and after the intervention in students' listening comprehension. This might be due to the short intervention time, variability of students' commitments towards the supplementary asynchronous blended listening activities and internet connectivity issues. However, interestingly, results indicated that students highly used metacognitive listening strategies during the blended learning lessons like problem solving strategies, planning and evaluation strategies, direct attention strategies and mental translation strategies. Results also revealed that students used moderate personal knowledge strategies. This study serves as a good reference for future studies.