Application Of Learner Training To Art Majors In English Autonomous Listening Learning

Listening comprehension is an active conscious process in which listener constructs meaning by using cues from contextual information and existing knowledge, which relying upon multiple strategic resources to fulfill the task requirements. However, traditional teaching pattern of listening comprehension in our country is not teaching but testing, which inevitably meets with a lot of failure in improving student's listening ability. With the shift of the focus of teaching from "how to teach" to "how to learn", autonomous listening learning has drawn widespread attention. To cultivate students' automatic listening ability is a subject facing Chinese English teachers. Learner's training can improve student's listening ability. A lot of studies and researches have been done in China on university and college students of English and non-English majors. However, little attention has been paid to students of art majors, who are a special group in college. These students, including students majoring in design, drawing etc., in comparison with other majors, maintain lower interest, less confidence and weaker willpower in English study. On the basis of learner's training, the present author used the first-year art major students at Wuhan Technology University as subjects, took learner's training as focus and made a comprehensive study of how to integrate learner's training into autonomous listening learning, thus cultivate students to be automatic listeners. The paper consists of a questionnaire and an experiment to solve the following questions:1) What is the current situation of English autonomous listening of art majors?2)What are the differences between art majors'students and non-art major students in English autonomous listening?3) Is the learner's training effective in enhancing English listening competence of art majors?4) Can strategies-based instruction improve art major students' listening achievement?Data from the questionnaire was run by SPSS, which showed that there were great distances between art majors and non-art major students. According to our questionnaire, we knew that the students were weak in listening autonomic ability compared the non-art major students, had little acquaintance with listening strategy. On the basis of result above, the author carried out an experiment to prove that learner's training can improve students'listening ability. The research subjects were 53 students of art majors, Grade one, from two equivalent classes which were randomly designated as experimental and controlled class. We applied quantitative methods and SPSS to collect statistics data from pre-and post-tests to assess the relevance between achievements and autonomic ability. The Independent-samples T Test showed no difference between two classes before experiments, that is, students were equivalent in listening. In the teaching experiment, all kind of listening strategies were taught to the experimental class. After 15-week training, the subjects attended a post-training test and the result of this test were used to compare with that of the pre-test test. According to a serial of statistic analysis after experiment, the post independent-samples T test showed that the experimental class students' listening achievements were evidently better than the controlled class students', which showed positive correlation between listening proficiency and listening autonomic ability.According to above analysis, it may help heighten students' listening proficiency to train them with autonomic ability. In the end, based on summarizing teaching experiment and starting from relevance between listening and automatic ability, the thesis gives some teaching suggestions, probably heuristic to related teachers and students.