An Application Of Learning Strategy In English Listening Teaching To Chinese Non-English Major Students

Listening comprehension is an active and conscious process in which the listener constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and existing knowledge, while relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirement (O'Malley and Chamot, 1989: 434).However, the traditional teaching pattern of listening comprehension in our country is not teaching but testing, which inevitably meets with a lot of failure in improving students'listening ability. With the shift of the focus of teaching from"how to teach"to"how to learn", learning strategies and strategy training have drawn widespread attention. O'Malley and Chamot (1990) confirmed the theory put forward by Anderson (1983,1985) that listening comprehension can be divided into three phases—perception, parsing and utilization and strategy training can improve students'listening ability. To cultivate students'automatic listening ability is also a subject facing Chinese English teachers. On the basis of listening strategy studies at home and abroad, the present author used the second-year non-English major students at Southeast University as subjects, took listening strategy training as the focus and made a comprehensive study of how to integrate strategy training into listening teaching, thus cultivating students to be automatic listeners. The paper consists of two experiments to solve the following four questions:(1) Can Chinese non-English major students'listening comprehension process be divided into three phases such as perception, parsing and utilization?(2) What is the relationship between the listeners'listening strategies and their listening achievement?(3) What strategies do the listeners employ to facilitate their listening comprehension?(4) Can strategies-based instruction improve Chinese non-English major students'listening ability?Effective and ineffective listeners were picked out according to a listening test (pre-training test). Their"think-aloud"showed that the Chinese non-English major students'listening comprehension could be divided into three phases such as perception, parsing and utilization. Data from the questionnaire and the listening test were run by SPSS, which showed that listening strategies and listening achievement were correlated positively and these students did not value other strategies as highly as bottom-up processing, which led to the fact that they were far from successful. On the basis of the results above, the author carried out a teaching experiment to prove that...