Study Of Listening Comprehension Strategies For Collegiate Non-English Majors

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 or techniques. According to Rost (1991), 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.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate what and how the non-English majors employ listening comprehension strategies in the compound dictation test and the relationship between their strategies and outcomes. 220 first-year non-English majors were chosen randomly in South West Jiaotong University to complete a compound dictation test and questionnaire. It is found that successful listening requires various strategies, especially those key strategies, while the less efficient subjects mainly use bottom-up processing. It is an anxious state of English listening teaching and learning, which implies that it is urgent to help the non-English majors to develop effective listening comprehension strategies in a certain kind of test.The case study was made in order to find out why the students got different achievements in their English listening test in detail. The dissertation will focus on the learner differences caused by the learners' use of respective listening comprehension strategies, by choosing two from the subjects participating in the investigation. Two students representing the more and less successful learners individually were interviewed. It will provide some evidence in support of the final general characteristic of good language learners梖lexible and appropriate use of learning strategies, which is quite effective to their outcome.In short, this thesis not only introduces the nature and the three major components of listening comprehension, as well as the main factors affecting listening comprehension, but also discusses what listening comprehension strategies should be developed for non-English majors. Based on the framework of O'Malley and Chamot, the thesis 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 the training of these strategies. Students may enhance their listening comprehension ability and make greater progress in less time in English listening and speaking. Therefore, in the course of listening teaching or learning practice, after recommended to a number of strategies that are more suitable for advanced learners, students would be motivated to choose flexibly and appropriately by themselves and be accustomed to using the combinations of them effectively.Of course, empirical study is needed in the farther study in the future.