Studies On Improving Listening Abilities Of College Non-English Majors By Applying Cognitive Strategies

Recent years increasing importance has been attached to English which is a tool forinternational communication especially in universities with the requirement of finding agood job after graduation. Listening is the input of language and those who listen oftenare able to produce the language output. In order to increase the effectiveness oflistening, learning strategies have become the focus of attention among languageresearchers in the past few decades. Among these learning strategies, the effect ofcognitive strategies in language learning is confirmed and paid more attention to.Therefore, it’s necessary for teachers to apply cognitive strategies into English listeningclass to improve learners’ listening ability.So as to cultivate students’ consciousness of cognitive strategy usage, the author ofthis dissertation plans to pursue a study of developing students’ listening ability throughcognitive strategy training. The participants in this study are72non-English majorsophomores in Changchun Normal University which are divided into experimentalgroup and control group. The study which is carried out for one semester withquestionnaire and listening tests as the instruments aims to find out:1) which cognitivestrategies are frequently used by college students of non-English majors in listeningcomprehension?2) Can cognitive strategies training enhance the Chinese non-Englishmajor students’ listening ability? To achieve convincing results, SPSS software is usedto analyze the data of this study and the listening comprehension parts of CET Band4are used as the listening tests.The analyses of the data indicate that college students of non-English majors areaware of using cognitive strategies when they do the listening comprehension. However, the types of cognitive strategies used by students are very limited. Keywords andnote-taking are the most frequently strategies they use. By comparing the scores theexperimental group gets from the pre-test and the post-test, we can see that their scoreshave been improved in varying degrees after one semester’s training; that is to say,cognitive strategies training can enhance learners’ listening ability.In conclusion, the present study provided a trial example for college Englishlistening teaching and learning. The results of the study indicate that cognitive strategieshave a significant effect on non-English major students in China. Therefore, variouslistening strategies should be introduced to listening class and college teachers shouldcultivate learners’ autonomy of learning English as much as possible.