Self-Monitoring Strategy Training In Listening Comprehension Tasks

This thesis is mainly intended to investigate the effect of self-monitoring strategy training on listening comprehension tasks, and on this basis, the author attempts to infer whether learning strategies can be trained. The other purpose of the thesis is to propose a tentative model for self-monitoring strategy training in listening comprehension tasks. By random sampling, the author chose 80 sophomores from Chinese Department and Educational Department of Tianjin Normal University as the subjects. The 40 students in Chinese Department constituted the treatment group; the students in Educational Department constituted the control group. As far as the treatment group was concerned, in class, the author explained to the students the significance of the self-monitoring strategies, and the way of using them in listening comprehension tasks, and asked the students to apply them to their listening comprehension tasks and also asked them to finish the homework after class which was assigned by the author. In the case of the students in the control group, they were not instructed in self-monitoring strategies, but were asked to finish the same homework with their own strategies. During the experiment, both the treatment group and the control group took the same four tests. By analyzing the results of the tests, the author would evaluate the listening proficiency of the students in both groups. The results of the experiment demonstrated that after the 60-day training, the treatment group outperformed the control group in listening comprehension tasks. The result of pretest showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups in listening proficiency, but the results of the two mid- training tests and the posttest indicated that the treatment group performed better than the control group not only in the retention and retrieval of the learnt materials, but also in the overall listening proficiency. This could prove that self-monitoring strategy training could improve the learners?performance in listening comprehension tasks. Then, from the cognitive view, the author gave an account of the effectiveness of the self-monitoring strategy training. What抯 more, after the training, the questionnaire which was to evaluate the maintenance and transfer of the self-monitoring strategies suggested that a large number of the students could continue applying the self-monitoring strategies to their listening comprehension tasks and many of them could transfer the strategies to the other language skills, which also provided a support for the self-monitoring strategy training. At last, on the basis of the results and the discussions, the author made an inference that if the method was scientific enough, learning strategies could be trained.