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Many language experts and researcher emphasised the crucial awareness and intervention to accentuate listening comprehension. However, listening skill is the least prominent and seldom tackled compared to other language skills. Listening is the key to an effective communication in university and in real life. It is used widely during tertiary education and associated to the overall academic achievement. Listening skill was not developed enough to effectively process the input from various resources across disciplines. Students also often perceive that listening is an innate skill and will be improved naturally. But listening skill can be very complex where students need to direct focus, derive meaning, and differentiate the sound. Therefore, they need to have a clear understanding of the processes involved in listening comprehension. Additionally, they need to integrate strategies that can be used to enhance comprehension. Having self-efficacy beliefs and employing the appropriate listening strategies can improve focus and promote listening comprehension. This study probe on the relationship between listening self-efficacy and metacognitive awareness of listening strategies (MALS). Two instruments were utilised in this study which are English Listening Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (ELSEQ) and Metacognitive Awareness of Listening Strategies Questionnaire (MALQ). Students showed moderate level of listening self-efficacy in this study. Next, students partly agreed with the metacognitive awareness of listening strategies, and problem solving has the highest average score followed by directed attention. Equally important, there was a positive correlation between the learner’s self-efficacy beliefs and the average score of their MALS. This study is hoped to shed the light on listening skill empirically so that students can progress their listening process during their degree study.

The nature of listening is less visible compared to other skills such as speaking and writing. This might be challenging for teacher and students to monitor their proficiency progress and further make students become demotivated. Listening self-efficacy is one of the most important constructs to accentuate listening comprehension. Listening self-efficacy related to students’ belief in executing the task to produce the desired outcome. This study was conducted among science foundation students from Preparatory Centre for Science and Technology, Universiti Malaysia Sabah. The participants are from 2020/2021 enrolment. The study employs qualitative method where eighteen students were interviewed to answer questions that are adapted form English Listening Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (ELSEQ). Analysis of interview shows that there were five aspects that facilitated students’ listening self-efficacy which are repetition, language proficiency and deliverance of a speaker, listening setting, non- verbal communication and first language. Delving into listening self-efficacy will shed the light on the importance of listening skill not only in language testing but also in real-life communication. This will hope to further improve their listening comprehension throughout their tertiary education.