Roghayeh Sajedi - Semnan University of Medical Sciences, Semnan, Iran

Language teaching methodology has seen a dramatic increase in attention to the strategic investment that learners can make in their own learning process. The learning of any skill involves a certain degree of investment of one’s time and effort. Every complex set of skills is acquired through a combination of observing, focusing, practicing, monitoring, correcting and redirecting. In most classrooms, learners are not aware of the strategies underlying the learning task in which they are engaged. It is often due to their low level of learning strategy knowledge and lack of metacognitive control. Knowledge of strategies is important because the greater awareness you have of what you are doing, the learning will be more effective. Another point, which is of great importance in teaching, is familiarizing the students with different genres. Despite the growing interest in the concept of genre and proved advantages of a genre-based approach to language teaching over the traditional methods of teaching, genre-based approach has not received deserving attention. This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of genre awareness on the Iranian EFLlearners' listening comprehension of narrative and expository genres. To make the students aware of the genres, genre mapping strategy training was employed. To come up with the objectives of the study, a total number of 60 pre-intermediate EFL students participated in the study as the control and experimental groups with the latter receiving genre-mapping instruction and being taught how to use their awareness of the structure of the genre to bettermake them enable to comprehend the narrative and expository genres. Meanwhile the control group received extensive listening of the two genres. After a two month period of instruction, the same listening comprehension tests were used as posttests. The gathered data was subjected to statistical procedures. Accordingly, t-tests were run and the results were analyzed. It was concluded that students in the experimental group, while listening to novel news and stories, had greater self-confidence and were not intimidated by unfamiliarity with such kinds of text type

genre awareness; genre mapping strategy; narratives; expository genre