<![CDATA[Listening assessment in EFL classrooms often focuses on final comprehension scores while giving limited attention to students’ thinking processes during listening activities. Therefore, this study aimed to explore students’ metacognitive listening strategies through reflective think-aloud protocols. This study employed a qualitative descriptive design involving 21 students from the Critical Listening class in the English Education Study Program selected through purposive sampling. Data were collected through retrospective reflective verbal reports recorded by students after completing their classroom listening tasks. The data were analyzed thematically using the metacognitive framework of planning, monitoring, and evaluating. The findings revealed that students employed various metacognitive strategies during listening activities. In the planning stage, students prepared themselves by reading instructions, predicting topics, and preparing supporting tools before listening. During the monitoring stage, students actively regulated their comprehension by replaying audio, focusing on keywords, taking notes, and guessing meaning from context. Monitoring strategies appeared as the most dominant process, indicating that students relied heavily on real-time strategy regulation to overcome listening difficulties such as fast speech, unfamiliar vocabulary, and different accents. In the evaluating stage, students reflected on their comprehension and identified the effectiveness of the strategies they used. The findings suggest that reflective think-aloud protocols can reveal learners’ metacognitive regulation more deeply than conventional score-based listening assessment. This study contributes to EFL listening research by demonstrating how reflective verbal reports can provide insights into learners reported metacognitive strategies and listening difficulties beyond conventional comprehension scores.]]>
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