Language educators tend to focus extensively on reading and writing skills. Listening activities are often carried out only to test the students' abilities which may lead to their anxiety and apprehension (Vandergrift, 1999). Generally, many students face difficulty in their listening assessments. Students need to apply certain mental steps or operations in listening to encounter their listening problems. These mental steps are referred to as strategies to assist the learners to achieve a reasonable listening comprehension (Goh, 2002).This study is designed to identify the students' levels of Metacognitive Awareness Strategies in performing their listening tasks and to examine the influence of the strategies on their test scores. The study was conducted in two stages of Pre-test and Post-test, where 100 participants were selected based on a convenience sampling. After submitting their Pre and Post-tests, they were required to complete a Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), developed by Vandergrift et al. (2006). Overall, the findings show an increase in the percentage of correct answers for the listening comprehension task, based on the MCQ given. The findings reveal that metacognitive strategy awareness has a positive effect on students' test scores. ESL teachers can enhance the use of MALQ strategies for listening comprehension. Further research is necessary to study how metacognitive strategies affect the students' listening performance, as well as, to conduct interventions that will encourage metacognitive awareness.

Although explicit teaching of vocabulary is often practised in language classrooms, it has been proven to be rather ineffective since words are not taught in context. This leads to the increasing use of incidental vocabulary learning approach, which emphasises on repeated readings as a source for vocabulary learning. By adopting this approach, this study aims to investigate students’ ability in learning vocabulary incidentally via verbal dramatisation of written texts. In this case, readers’ theatre (RT) is used as a way to allow learners to engage in active reading so as to promote vocabulary learning. A total of 160 diploma students participated in this case study and they were divided equally into two groups, namely classroom reading (CR) and reader’s theatre (RT) groups. A proficiency test was first conducted to determine their vocabulary levels. Based on the test results, a story was selected as the reading material for the two groups. The CR group read the story through a normal reading lesson in class while the RT group was required to verbally dramatize the text through readers’ theatre activity. Then, a post-test based on vocabulary levels was carried out and the results were compared. The findings revealed that incidental learning was more apparent in the RT group and their ability to learn words from the higher levels was noticeable through higher accuracy scores. Although not conclusive, this study has demonstrated the potential of using readers’ theatre as a form of incidental vocabulary learning activity in ESL settings.

Learning tenses is an uphill task for ESL (English as a Second Language) learners, especially children. One of the reasons is that grammatical structures in English are inherently different from those of the mother tongue. More often than not learners find it difficult to comprehend and apply the rules accurately for effective communication. Hence, they become frustrated and give up trying to learn the language. The main purpose of TYT is to address the said problems faced by these learners besides providing a fun, exciting and interactive environment to reinforce the rules of tenses learnt. Presently, English language games tend to focus on parts of speech and vocabulary learning but not many emphasise on tenses. TYT fills in the gap to reinforce the learning of tenses and its application in different everyday contexts. Children can learn with their peers while playing in an enjoyable setting which will promote better retention of their tenses knowledge. TYT is also useful for language educators as an alternative teaching tool to drill the rules of tenses which otherwise would be too monotonous and dry for students in the classroom.