Training Of Learning Strategies In English Teaching

Strictly speaking, the research on learning strategies has only a history of about thirty years. Linguistic circles in the US and Canada witnessed the emergence of research on LS in mid-1970s. The counterparts in China started to devote to this field about a decade later.Learning strategies became the hot issue of applied linguistics with the background that language education began to emphasize more on meeting the individual requirements of learners. Language teachers and researchers have acknowledged the importance of the inter-communicative framework with learners as the center when teaching a language. Learners are being encouraged to 'learn how to learn' and 'learn how to use' a foreign language by LS training. Besides according to the cognitive psychology hypothesis that language learning strategies may be not different from those used with non-language tasks, the ultimate of LS training is to foster autonomous learners, not necessarily confined to language learning.Intended to further promote the research on learning strategies from the realistic respective, this paper focuses on training of LS in English teaching classrooms. In China, the acquisition of English listening competency has always been a big challenge for students in universities and not a few instructors are still following the old-fashioned teaching way with the teacher as the definite center. So for its typical features listening course is chosen as the study case in the paper in order to offer pedagogical implications for the cultivation of other linguistic skills.56 Grade 2 students who failed in the final English exam in Zhejiang University of Science and Technology are chosen to take part in the survey of this paper which is carried out mainly through the following four forms: pre and post tests, learning diries, small group interviews, and immediate retrospective verbalization, with the purpose to investigate the impact of listening strategy instruction on learners and the difficulties or barriers encountered by students in the process to acquire listening strategies.From the contrast ofpre and post tests, we can only see a slight improvement of the listeners' performance in listening while from the recollective surveys we could know one of the goals of the strategy instruction has been achieved, that is, to raise the consciousness of the strategy use among foreign language learners. In addition, barriers to acquire LS are summarized and corresponding countermeasures are put forward.