147 Jelisaveta F. Šafranj 1 Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad Aleksandra G. Gojkov Rajić Preschool Teacher Training College “Mihailo Palov”, Vršac Marina M. Katić Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad THE EFFECTS OF STUDENTS’ META-COGNITIVE ABILITIES AND GENDER ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR FOREIGN LANGUAGE SKILLS This study of meta-cognitive abilities and their impact on the development of foreign language skills makes a signifcant contribution to research into foreign language teaching and learning in general. The study presented in this paper was carried out on a large sample of university students in Serbia, illustrating its relevance to this educational setting. The study looks at the use of meta- cognitive strategies examined through the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) questionnaire (Oxford, 1990) as well as the efects of gender on the development of students’ language skills, as reported through self-assessment. Five out of nine elements of meta-cognitive strategy were found to be predictive of self-assessment of language skills. This fnding supports the assumption that the use of meta-cognitive strategies is important in building language skills. However, the study failed to discover evidence of diferences in learning strategy use between genders, since only one out of nine elements was found to be statistically signifcant. The study found a relationship between gender and students’ perception of their own language skills. Men scored higher than women on all four variables, which means they assessed their own language skills better than the women did. The pedagogical implications are to consider didactic instructions that would encourage students to identify a problem in foreign language learning and to realize the ways in which actions are regulated, which would lead to a solution of the problem. gender, meta-cognitive strategies, foreign language learning, language skills Introduction Successful language learners have a wide variety of thinking skills. Since they are conscious of their knowledge, they know where, when, and how to apply it to any learn- ing situation. Researchers agree that successful learners possess meta-cognition, i.e. the conscious ability to recognize their own knowledge, and to understand and have con- trol over their own learning (Gojkov, 2010). Students with good meta-cognition are able to direct and monitor their own learning processes, and they have the ability to master information and apply learning strategies to solve problems more easily. The notion of meta-cognition originated in the 1970s in the context of information processing studies. The term is most often linked to John Flavell (Flavell, 1976; 1979), who found that a wide 1 E-mail: savetas@uns.ac.rs UDK-159.953.3.072:81'243-057.875 159.922.072-057.875 DOI: 10.5937/nasvas1801147S Оригинални научни рад НВ год. LXVII 1/2018 Abstract Keywords: