A Study Of The Influence Of Listening Styles On Listening Comprehension In Senior High School

In English learning,listening is one of the most difficult language skills to master.However,for a long time,English teaching in China has placed too much emphasis on reading and writing skill training instead of the listening and speaking.Since the early 1990 s,many scholars at home and abroad have studied on listening comprehension from the perspective of listening contexts,cultural background knowledge and listening strategies,etc.,but there has been relatively little research on the listening style so far.Therefore,this thesis tries to explore the overall trend of the senior high school students’ listening style by conducting a survey to answer the following three research questions:1.What is the current situation of senior high school students in listening style?2.Is the senior high school students’ listening performance affected by their listening style?3.Is there a significant difference in listening style among students with different levels?What are the differences?The 200 Grade 10 subjects are from No.One Middle School of Linfen City.The research instruments contain the listening style questionnaire,the listening level test paper,verbal report and interview.The listening style questionnaire involved 32 items.The listening test paper is selected from the listening section of the English test for college entrance examinations in 2017.Subsequently,based on the listening test results,the subjects were divided into high,middle,and low level groups;then the subjects were asked to answer the questionnaires on listening styles,and the data were analyzed by means of SPSS.Moreover,the think-aloud and verbal report as well as interviews were also adopted in the study.Consequently,this study has reached the following conclusions:Firstly,the analytic,global and synthetic listening styles do exist in most of the students surveyed.Among them,8.5% of the students belong to analytic listening style;22.5% of them belong to synthetic listening style,and 36% of them belong to global listening style.Secondly,the senior high school students’ listening performance is affected by the listening style,and there is a significant correlation between synthetic listening style and listening performance.The students with synthetic listening styles usually performs betterthan those with the global listening style and analyitc listening style in the listening performance;while the other two listening styles and listening performance did not show significant correlation in this study.The implications of this study are as follows: Teachers should guide students to understand and develop good listening styles,and the students should apply more synthetic listening style than the analytic listening style and the global listening style to improve their listening comprehension performance.