Developing Non-English Majors' Listening Comprehension Strategies In Teachers College

Listening plays a very important and active part both in language learning and daily life. With the enlargement and development of international contacts and academic exchanges, especially with the approaching of entering into WTO, English listening becomes more and more important to us Chinese, especially to non-English majors who are the new vital force on the scientific and educational fronts. While the non-English majors, influenced by the old-fashioned teaching methodology, are very poor in listening. How to help the students enhance their listening ability becomes more and more urgent and valuable.Nowadays, people have gradually realized the "teachability" of English listening. In other words, there is "something teachable" in English listening teaching, which refers to listening comprehension strategies and/or techniques.According to Rost (1991), listening strategies and listening ability are the goals of listening instruction. The use of listening strategies can develop listening ability. On the other hand, with their development of listening ability, students will utilize and create more strategies flexibly, which will facilitate the processing of information input. Their relationship can be illustrated in the following scheme:The aim of this dissertation is to explore what listening comprehension strategiesshould be developed and how to train these strategies integrating with listening teaching in the classroom.This dissertation consists of six chapters.Chapter One is the introduction. It introduces the nature of listening comprehension, and the aims of this dissertation.Chapter Two illustrates three major components of listening comprehension: speech perception, sentence parsing and discourse comprehension, introduces the schema theory, then presents an overall review of the approaches to listening, through which teachers and students will know more about the complex listening process.Chapter Three deals with a brief review of learning strategy and listening comprehension strategy research.Chapter Four talks about: (1) main factors affecting listening comprehension-knowledge, memory and affective factors; (2) several key listening strategies usually used by successful listeners; (3) the relationship between listening comprehension and autonomy.Chapter Five is the author's investigation on non-English majors' listening comprehension strategies, and at last, a summary of the needs for developing non-English majors' listening comprehension strategies is also presented.Chapter Six is the implications and conclusion. It is the core of this dissertation. Based on the theories presented in the previous chapters, especially on the findings in Chapter Five, Chapter Six discusses what listening comprehension strategies should be developed according to students' present situation, which concludes three metacognitive strategies: planning, selective attention, evaluating; and three cognitive ones: predicting, top-down processing and note-taking. It also presents a suggested procedure for training these strategies. And at the end of this chapter comes a conclusion to the whole dissertation.