Listening Strategies Employed By Non-English Majors In Military Academy

As an English skill, listening comprehension plays a very important role in English learning process, which requires the higher performance for the comprehensive capacity of the learners. Listening comprehension will directly affect the level of other language skills----speaking, reading and writing, thereby affecting the overall effect of second language acquisition.The researches show that due to some limitations of subjective and objective factors, listening comprehension has always been the·weakness of most university students, specially the students in military academies. Because in such a special environment, the students there have relatively small opportunities to contact with the outside world and they can not arrange their self-study time freely, so listening comprehension became the weakest link of English study for cadets. However, Both the strategic goal of cultivating high quality army officers for PLA and modem warfare require that Chinese military academies should produce a large number of commanding officers who can master English proficiently. Therefore, the English learners in military academies need more help and guidance in listening comprehension learning. With the development of English teaching and researching, how to improve students'English listening ability is becoming a topic of common concerns for English researchers and teachersAll these prompt this present study to conduct an in-depth research to 91 non-English majors who were decided into to chasses (respectively, the experimental classes and control classes) in a military academy. In the study, the author investigated the application status of strategies before instruction through questionnaires and interviews. Then, the author conducted a series of instruction to 49 tested students during 10-week period. The author investigated the effectiveness of strategies training by means of questionnaires, interviews and listening comprehension tests and analyzed the results, attempting to explore the relationship between comprehension ability and listening strategies employment, discussing whether the use of listening strategies can stimulate students' learning motivation, thus tries to summarize the experiences and lessons for improving the listening comprehension of military academy students. The findings are as follows: 1) The effect of strategy instruction on students' listening comprehension performance is obvious as is shown in the comparison between the pre-test and post-test of the experimental classes and control classes. The results gained from interview lend to support the above findings.2) The direct and integrated strategy instruction could enhance military academy students'awareness of strategy use to a large extent. When comparing the results of pre-instruction questionnaire with that of post-instruction questionnaire, the researcher found that metacognitive strategies experience greatest improvement among the three categories, which indicates students'taking more control of listening comprehension process.3) The direct and integrated strategy instruction can enhance military academy students'self-regulated learning. The analysis of interview transcripts reveals that these tudents are more active and purposeful in English learning, with clearer direction. What's more, the strategy instruction contributes to the building-up of the students' learning confidence and enables them to develop a more positive attitude towards learning English.Through the above findings, we've got the following inspiration:1) In English teaching, teachers should encourage students to use more listening strategies; 2) With the uniform schedule of military administration, teachers can fully acquainted with the situation of students'listening strategies employments in order to make proper guidance; 3) further explore the factors that affect the use of listening strategies thus can consciously cultivate listening strategies of students so as to improve their learning efficiency.This thesis consists of five parts. Chapter One shows the introduction of the whole thesis, briefly introducing the research background, the purpose of the study as well as thesis structure. Chapter Two is the literature review, which includes different definitions and classifications of listening strategies according to both domestic and foreign researchers. In this chapter the nature of listening and listening process, together with some factors affecting this listening process is presented. Chapter Three is the research design, concentrating on the description of the study, which includes specific objects, instruments and procedure of study. Chapter Four reports and discusses the research in detail and analyze the results from questionnaires, listening tests and interviews of the investigation. Chapter Five is the conclusion of this paper, in which some important implications and suggestions for strategy training are given. Limitations of the study are also pointed out in this chapter.