A Study Of Listening Comprehension Strategies In College English Autonomous Listening Classes

Computers have been used for language teaching since 1960s. Over the past decades, the advantage of the combination of text, audio and video input makes multimedia an excellent format for language learning materials and it is an increasingly important part of the language learning. In recent years' ELT reforms, more and more colleges and teachers have started to apply multimedia computers to college English teaching, especially for the training of listening and speaking skills.Listening, one of the most frequently used forms of language skills, plays a significant role in daily communication and educational process. Researches have demonstrated that listening comprehension plays a key role in facilitating language learning. Listening strategies and strategy training are important factors that influence listening comprehension. Especially in autonomous learning, without teachers aside giving instruction, students must manage their own learning. Under this learning environment, listening strategies become more important than in the traditional listening classes.Learning strategies are the behavior and thoughts that learners employ during learning in order to better help them understand, learn or remember new information. Viewing listening as a cognitive skill, most researchers on listening strategies prefer O'Malley & Chamot's way of classification of learning strategies and similarly divide listening strategies into three categories: metacognitive, cognitive and social/affective listening strategies; each category also includes several sub-strategies. Metacognitive strategies include planning, directed attention, selective attention, self-management, monitoring, evaluation and problem identification. Cognitive strategies include inferencing, elaboration, summarization, translation, resourcing, note-taking, deduction/induction and substitution. Social/affective strategies include questioning for clarification, cooperation, lowering anxiety, self-encouragement and taking emotional temperature.This paper reports on a survey of the listening strategies used by a group of college English students in autonomous-leaning listening classes. The aims of the study are to investigate levels of strategy use among the students, to examine relation between listening strategy use and listening comprehension achievement, to compare the listening strategy use of different achievement students, and to analyze the characteristics of listening strategy use in autonomous-learning listening classes. A questionnaire is used to examine the students' use of listening strategies. The results show that cognitive strategies are the most used, while social/affective strategies are the least used. In this study, it is found that there is significant variation in achievement in relation to eight out of twenty strategies. Of these, four are in the cognitive category, two in the metacognitive category, and two in the social/affective category. Different achievement groups have significant difference in the use of six listening strategies: planning, selective attention, inferencing, elaboration, translation, and questioning for clarification. Due to the characteristics of autonomous-learning listening classes, metacognitive strategies and social/affective strategies get more importance than traditional listening classes. The paper concludes that students need some listening strategy instructions to get better learning effect and higher achievement in autonomous learning.