Application Of Learning Strategies In The Teaching Of Listening Comprehension

Due to the importance of listening comprehension among the four basic foreign/second language acquisition skills, considerable attention has been given to the pedagogic method of improving listeners' proficiency. This thesis is a tentative study of improving students' listening proficiency from the viewpoint of strategy training. In early times, the discussion of listening teaching focused on input adaptations made by teachers to enhance comprehension. However, such exclusive focus on teachers' behaviors is constrained by failure to explore listeners' internal strategy employed in the listening process and inevitably meets an unsuccessful ending of improving listeners' proficiency. It was not until 1960s that the focus of research shifted from "how to teach" to "how to learn". For the first time, it was world- widely acknowledged that training students to listen is more important. Listening strategy training has become prosperous especially after the empirical study made by O'Malley and Chamot (1989: 418-437), in which they verified Anderson's theory of listening process (and confirmed that strategy instruction could help students to utilize the language input they received, and to improve their performance on listening tasks. This is especially true as far as Chinese college students are concerned. At present, on account of large enrollment, a college class is usually composed of 60 students or so, whose listening ability varies a lot. College students are supposed to learn mostly by themselves in the new surroundings. A case in point is the large increasing amount of online students who conduct their studies mostly online. Therefore, online students' learning autonomy becomes the most critical factor that overwhelms their whole studies in college life. Hence, how to foster students' ability to listen independently has become the major concern of the teachers. Drawing on the research on learning strategies at home and abroad, this thesis finally sets up the training of learning strategies as the focus and probes how to integrate strategy training into the college English listening teaching for online students who are non-English majors.In order to verify the effects of strategies-based English listening teaching, the author has undergone a 14-week-long teaching program with reference to Anderson's theory of listening process divided into three phases, listeners' problems related to the three phases and the strategy-training model proposed by O'Malley and Chamot. The study consisted of one descriptive study and one interventionist study. In the descriptive study, the present author managed to answer the following three questions: (1) Can the listening comprehension processes of Chinese-speaking EFL students also be differentiated into phrases such as perceptual processing, parsing, and utilization? (2) What specific strategies/tactics do the students choose to solve the problems in the three phrases to facilitate listening comprehension? (3) Are there differences in listening comprehension strategies between the high-ability listeners and low-ability listeners. The subjects were composed of 58 first-year college students who were randomly chosen from the online students' population studying English in Huazhong University of Science and Technology. After taking a listening test, students were classified into low-, intermediate- and high-ability groups according to the scores in listening test. The present author asked the high-ability students and low-ability students to think aloud after listening to 2 passages. According to the data acquired, the present author can verify that Anderson's theory is also applicable to the Chinese-speaking English listeners. The strategies/tactics employed during the three phases were mainly cognitive strategies/tactics and metacognitive strategies/tactics. Cognitive strategies are inferencing, elaboration, prediction, and contextualization as well. Metacognitive strategies are selective attention, directed attention and comprehension monitoring. After providing the 'thin...