English Learner's Listening Strategies

Due to the importance of listening comprehension among the four basic second language acquisition skills, considerable attention has been given to the pedagogic method of improving listeners' proficiency. This paper is a tentative study of improving students' listening proficiency from the viewpoint of strategy training. It was not until 1960s that the focus of research shifted from "how to teach" to "how to learn". For the first time, it was worldwide acknowledged that training students to listen is more important. Listening strategy training has become prosperous especially after the empirical study made by O'Malley and Chamot (1989), in which they verified Anderson's theory of listening process and confirmed that strategy instruction could help students to utilize the language input they received, and to improve their performance on listening tasks. This is especially true as far as Chinese college students are concerned. Hence, how to foster students' ability to listen independently has become the major concern of the teachers.In order to verify the effects of strategies-based English listening teaching, the author has undergone a teaching program with reference to Anderson's theory of listening process divided into three phases, listeners' problems related to the three phases and the strategy-training model proposed by O'Malley and Chamot. The subjects were randomly chosen from the sophomores from different majors who studying English as their second language in Dalian Fisheries University. After taking a listening test, students were classified into low-ability, intermediate-ability and high-ability groups according to the scores in listening test. The author asked the high-ability students and low-ability students to think aloud after listening to two passages. According to the data acquired, the author can verify that Anderson's theory is also applicable to the Chinese-speaking English listeners. After providing the "think aloud' data, the subjects were demanded to fill into a questionnaire based on Oxford's strategy inventory (1990) for language learning. Finally, the t-test was used to compare the means of two groups (poor-ability and high-ability listeners) in using listeningstrategies. The results confirmed that the difference of listening strategy used between high-ability and poor-ability listeners was statistically significant.