Listening in Digital Contexts: How EFL Learners Navigate Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies Across Modality and Proficiency

Listening in a second language increasingly takes place in digital and multimodal environments, raising questions about how learners adapt their strategies across modalities and proficiency levels. This study investigates how Taiwanese undergraduates (N = 24) reported their use of cognitive and metacognitive listening strategies in audio-only versus audiovisual online tasks in semi-guided digital settings where materials were teacher-selected and explicit instruction was constrained. Results from this exploratory sample suggest that inferencing was the only cognitive strategy robustly enhanced by multimodal input, while proficiency appeared to exert a stronger influence overall, with higher-level learners tending to report broader use of inferencing and monitoring. These exploratory findings tentatively highlight a real-world challenge: Multimodal input, now common in online platforms, may not automatically foster adaptive strategy use. The study points to a potential need for explicit scaffolding that helps learners notice and integrate visual cues, and for proficiency-sensitive support that prevents reliance on less effective strategies such as translation. By situating a local EFL case within wider debates on digital language learning, this research contributes to understanding how applied linguistics can mediate between strategy theory and classroom practice.