The Study Of The Effectiveness Of Self-Monitoring Strategies On English Listening Comprehension

Listening skill plays a crucial role whether in our daily life or in language learning. It forms the major part of the communication competence. However, it is the skill many students feel difficult to learn. Moreover, the new College English Teaching Syllabus issued by our National Education Department requires teachers to develop, in particular, students' listening and speaking abilities and their autonomy. Then how can teachers help their students to achieve this goal? In the previous studies, some researches concentrated on learning strategies training with English majors or non-English majors, which is a learning method adopted by learners in language acquisition or learning and is viewed as a learner's action. So importance hasn't been attached to it in class yet. However, the author of the present thesis thinks it should become essential in listening classes. Effective instructions in listening lessons are critical.Learning strategy training has already begun in a few universities, but few of them know how to integrate the training into classroom teaching. Thus this integrated teaching method is noted. The author of this thesis attempts to fill up the gap by setting up a tentative model for self-monitoring strategy training in listening comprehension, in the hope that it will become a valuable learning experience. Based on the prior contributions, the thesis begins with an analysis of difficulties in listening comprehension students have in foreign language learning, and then the author puts forward a self-monitoring strategy training model through the field experiment. In the experiment, two methods are used to develop learner autonomy: "self-monitoring-strategy training in class" and "signing learner contract with the learner after class." Based on the belief that self-monitoring strategy training can improve students' listening comprehension, two experiments were carried out in the research, one was anexperiment to explore whether this strategy is helpful to improve students' listening comprehension, the other was a questionnaire to investigate whether learning strategy can be trained and whether students can transfer this skill to the other language skills of language learning after training.The author conducted the strategy training experiment for 60 days with 80 sophomores of non-English majors in Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering. Four listening tests adopted from the revised CET band 4, both questionnaires of difficulties in listening comprehension and the feedback on the effect of self-monitoring strategy training designed elaborately by the investigator, class observation and students' self-report were used as instruments to collect data. This experiment was done both in class and after class, to the treatment group the author explained the significance of the strategy and the specific usage to direct their listening comprehension in class, and the author asked students to practise and apply this strategy into their listening assignments by means of signing a learner contract after class. To the control group the author didn't perform this training and asked them to finish the same tasks by using their routine methods. During the experiment, the two groups of students were required to participate in four tests. SPSS (10.0) was employed to derive information from collected data. All work was designed to reach the objectives of exploring the effect of self-monitoring strategy on listening comprehension.Both statistical and qualitative results indicate that after sixty days training the listening comprehension ability of the students in treatment group has been improved more than that of the students in the control group. The test result before training, however, shows that there is no significant difference between the two groups in their listening comprehension. But thetwo mid-tests training and the post-test training reveal that the performance of the treatment group students is much better than that of the control group students in terms of their memory and retrieval of the old...