A Study Of The Correlation Between Learning Strategies And Listening Proficiency In College English Teaching

Listening, as a means of language communication activity, occupies a significant place in language teaching, which ranks the first place in the four basic language skills. As an important receptive skill, listening is the way not only to absorb and to strength the language knowledge but also to develop the competence to speak and write. Listening has been emphasized in China's College English curriculum and examinations since the mid-1980. However, this skill remains poor and difficult for many learners even after they have finished six or ten years of experience in learning English. How to improve listening proficiency has become a great concern for most English learners. In the same condition, why can some students improve their listening ability with efficiency while some cannot make any satisfactory achievement?This paper, using questionnaire survey and quantitative analysis, intends to find out: (1) What strategies are used in the listening process by non-English majors? (2) Is there correlation between listening proficiency and learning strategies? (3) What are the best predictors of listening proficiency? Randomly-selected 120 second-year non-English majors in Huangshi Institute of Technology were administered the survey questionnaire on learning strategies. The questionnaire involves such 6 learning strategy variables as memory strategy, cognitive strategy, metacognitive strategy, compensation strategy, affective strategy and social strategy.In the following research, Correlation Coefficient Analysis was used to examine the relationship between the six learning strategies and listening proficiency. Taking the results of listening tests as dependent variables, we use Multiple Regression in SPSS to see if the learning strategy variables predict the students' listening proficiency. Correlation Coeffiecient Analysis shows: (1) Both beginning and intermediate level non-English major undergraduates were able to describe their use of a wide range of learning strategies. The most frequently used strategies were compensation strategies, and the least frequently employed strategies were memory strategies. (2) Cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies, compensation strategies, memory strategies, affective strategies and social strategies all demonstrated significant correlation with listening proficiency. (3) Metacognitive strategies were the strongest predictor of listening proficiency. Association/elaboration, contextualizing, practice, reasoning& analyzing, guessing/inferencing, seeking practice opportunities, paying attention, taking emotional temperature and developing cultural understanding were ways to achieve high listening proficiency in terms of good grades in listening in this study.The implication of the study is that teachers can help their students become effective listeners by encouraging them to apply a variety of learning strategies to listening tasks.This paper consists of six parts.Part One is an introduction. It discusses the importance and necessity for investigating learning strategies for college students, represents the research questions and introduces the framework of the paper.Part Two describes the theoretical background from cognitive perspective for the study, including the definition and classification of second language learning strategies, a brief introduction of listening strategies.Part three is a presentation of the research method and procedures of the experiment carried out in this study.Part Four reports and discusses the result of the experiment by presenting data analysis.Part Five provides some implications for listening teaching.Part Six draws a conclusion from the research.