Computer-assisted Listening Teaching And The Study Of Listening Comprehension Strategies

Listening comprehension has been playing an important role in daily communication and education as one of the most frequently used forms of language skills. In early times, the discussion of listening teaching focused on input adaptations made by teachers to enhance comprehension. However, such exclusive focus on teachers'behaviors is constrained by failure to explore listeners'internal strategy used in the listening process and inevitably meets an unsuccessful ending of improving listeners'listening proficiency. It was not until 1960s that the focus of research shifted from"how to teach"to"how to learn". For the first time, people began to show great concern about listening comprehension strategies (LCS). With the development of modern cognitive psychology, it is widely acknowledged that listening is an active mental process in which a listener tries to understand the listening materials with the help of listening strategies and kinds of knowledge. Thus the research of listening comprehension strategies is of great importance to the learning of listening. At present, with the background of college English teaching reform, autonomous learning of listening is becoming a trend which converts traditional listening teaching into autonomous listening learning. To investigate into the listening comprehension strategies of the autonomous listeners in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment turns to be a tough problem to all of the English teachers. The thesis will mainly focus on the influence of listening strategy use on the listening achievement in autonomous learning of listening in CALL environment. It is to investigate the relation between students'LCS use and their English levels in terms of listening comprehension.Sixty five undergraduates were selected as the subject for this study, among which thirty two students had passed the CET-4 English listening comprehension test and the other thirty three students hadn't. The instrument of the research is a questionnaire and the CET-4 listening comprehension test on June, 2006. The process of the research is to analyze the students'LCS use according to their listening academic record in CET-4.Then the main conclusions are drawn as follows:1. The results of statistical analysis revealed that the performance of the sampled students in the use of learning strategies was rather poor, especially of the social and affective strategies.2. The results of the research on the influence of listening comprehension strategies upon English listening comprehension indicated that there was an obvious influence: the students with better listening ability were better at using cognitive strategies, training related language abilities and using listening techniques.Based on the results, the author made some pedagogical suggestions on the instruction of the learning strategies in CALL environment and hoped that this would be helpful for English teaching and learning in China.