| The basic target of education is to make students become independent and effective learners. The students can improve their learning efficiency by grasping and using valid learning strategies. The training of learning strategies can improve the students' independent learning ability and help them accomplish their language-study tasks better. The study of learning strategies is a clear indication that modern English teaching is now paying more attention to language learners. Fostering students' independent learning abilities and making a foundation to the life-long learning have become one of the most important contents in college English teaching.Listening is an important skill during the language-learning. It is not only an important channel for getting comprehensive language inputs, but also the most important method of communication in English. However, the students' listening ability is very poor in vocational colleges. To improve their listening ability not only depends on their actual language knowledge, but is also restricted by their learning strategies. Therefore it is necessary for teachers to train students' listening strategies in teaching.Many scholars have done a lot of researches on foreign language learning strategies and gained fruitful achievements. But most researches have focused on university undergraduates, not on the students in vocational colleges. As an important part of higher education, vocational college students' English levels are very low and their studying tasks and targets are quite different from university undergraduates'. Therefore sufficient research on learning strategies of vocational colleges is necessary so as to provide scientific guide for strategy training.This paper mainly discusses how the listening strategies are used efficiently in English listening teaching in vocational colleges. The writer summarizes the relative researches on listening comprehension as well as learning strategies home and abroad and analyses the present situation of the students' English levels and listening teaching in vocational colleges. The writer uses Oxford's (1990) Strategies Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) to survey the students' status of English listening strategies in a vocational college and then makes statistical analyses of the data by using SPSS11.5. The results of the survey and analyses show that the frequency of using effective learning strategies by the vocational college students is very low, and there is a significant difference in the learning strategies between good learners and bad learners. Female students use learning strategies more frequently than male students in vocational colleges.According to the analyses and findings of the survey, the writer elaborates the procedure and the method of the strategies training in a vocational college. The freshmen, the subjects of the experiment, are divided into two classes (experiment class and contrast class). The students in the experiment class are trained for 15 weeks focusing on the following strategies: (1) Meta-cognitive strategies (Planning, Monitoring, Evaluating and Attention selected strategies); (2) Vocabulary memorizing strategies; (3) Cognitive strategies (Establishing schema strategies, Note-taking and Repetition); (4) Compensation strategies (Predicting); (5) Affective strategies (Lowering anxiety); (6) Social strategies ( Cooperating learning strategies) . The results of the strategy training show that the average score of the experiment class is higher than the contrast class' after training by comparing the two classes' scores of two listening tests. Especially, medium-standard students benefit more than other students in strategy training. Meanwhile, the strategy training enriches students' strategy knowledge and improve their independent learning ability. It is necessary and feasible to teach students learning strategies in listening. Training of listening strategies will help improve the learners' learning efficiency. |
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