The Research In Application Of Listening Strategies To English Teaching In Mongolian Senior High School

Listening, as one of the four language skills, is the core of the communicative activities and the base to promote the development of other language skills. However, traditional English teaching in China has always been overlooking the importance of listening comprehension despite the recognition of the critical role it plays both in communication and in language acquisition (Morley, J., 1991).In Inner Mongolian, listening scores, just as reference scores for English major students, are still not included in the NMET for both Chinese and Mongolian students. Therefore, Mongolian students pay less attention to listening and listening teaching is still ignored.Mongolian senior high school students are quite different from Chinese students in learning English, especially listening. Influenced by some subjective factors, such as their relatively inaccessible living situations, poor educational conditions, different cultural background, limited vocabulary, narrow information sources etc, their listening competence is lower than Chinese students. However, one of the main reasons for their poor listening competence is that they lack the training of listening strategies.This thesis aims to verify whether there are relationships between listening strategies (LS) and LC competence, to see whether high-score group students use more LS than low-score group students, in hope of helping Mongolian high school students improve their learning skills and LC efficiently and promoting the teaching of English listening in Mongolian senior high schools.The subjects of this study are 100 Mongolian students from two classes (each has 50 students) in Senior One in Xilingol Mongolian Senior High School. One class is the experimental group and the other is the control group. Both of them have one class hour each week and use the same listening materials and syllabus. However, the lesson plans for the experimental group focus on developing LS, while the lesson plans for the control group follow the traditional method without intention of applying strategy instruction into the teaching program. The instruments used in the research are a questionnaire on LLS adapted from Vandergrift's model (1996), an interview, a pre-test paper and after the experiment, a post-test will be conducted. In order to gain quantitative results, interviews are made to collect data from both the high-score group and low-score group. The thesis will focus on the practice of some key strategies, such as self-monitoring, selective attention, inferring, anxiety-reducing etc.This research has theoretical and practical significance. There are few researches on listening strategies employed by Mongolian middle school students. So it is expected that this research will provide some valuable reference and ideas for Mongolian high school teachers to improve the ELC, which is badly needed to Mongolian high school teaching.There are also some limitations of the research. Firstly, the source of the subjects is only 100 Mongolian students, so the size of the sample is relatively small; the twenty-week training is somewhat short for a language leaner to master the LC strategies; the LC strategy training will be only done in Mongolian classes, so it is not certain whether it is helpful to other ethnic group students when learning a third language.