Astudy On The Effects Of Listening Task Features Upon Senior High Students’ Listening Strategies And Attention Allocation

As one of the basic language skills,listening is an important channel to receive information as input.But compared with reading,listening has been paid limit attention in middle school English teaching in China due to its low proportion and low difficulty in the university entrance examination.Even when listening is taught in class,teachers pay much attention to listening practice,without instructing enough listening strategies.Some of them who claim to teach listening strategies in class may wrongly take test-taking strategies as listening strategies.This leads to low listening ability among English learners.To change the situation,this study aims to examine how listening task features stimulate different strategies and attention allocation so that teachers can instruct students’ use of listening strategies by manipulating different listening tasks.The research questions are as follows: 1.What is the situation of cognitive listening strategy use by senior high students? 2.What aspects of listening material do students mainly focus on in the listening process? 3.How do the listening task features affect students’ listening strategies and attention allocation?To answer the questions,questionnaire and think-aloud were employed as the research methods.300 participants from a senior high school in Tianjin were involved in this study.First,the questionnaire was distributed to the 300 students to investigate what listening strategies they often use and how their attention was allocated when processing the listening materials.And then four students were selected to complete think-aloud experiment to verify how different tasks affect their use of listening strategies and allocation of attention.The research findings are as follows:Students’ use of listening strategies is at the intermediate level.Strategies like inference,prediction,keyword-snagging,and note-taking are high frequently used,while some strategies like connection,analysis,summary and illustration are often neglected.In terms of attention allocation,students pay more attention to the details required in the testing items,while neglecting the information concerning the speaker’s attitude or the inner logic of the speech.It is also found that task features do make changes to strategy use and attention allocation.Task features including test methods and time of questioning were manipulated to observe the effects on students’ information-process.Compared with multiple choice,blank-filling and Q＆A tend to motivate more strategy use.Questions after the audio can guide students to move from noticing keywords to constructing complete content schemata.Based on the above findings,some implications for English listening teaching were put forward: teachers should design a variety of listening tasks to teach students strategies of listening.More subjective tasks instead of objective ones are suggested in class to construct content schemata.So repeated practice of high-stake exam paper should be avoided in class.