Strategy Training In Teaching Listening

The traditional listening instruction is teacher-centered, which emphasizes the massive input of exercises to enhance learner's listening performance. This teaching model takes listening comprehension as a passive and receptive process, which neglects the strategies that learners use to understand listening materials, to process information and to activate the prior knowledge etc. In recent years, studies on listening strategy training become active, and many researchers try to improve learners' listening proficiency through listening strategy training but the results are different which means there's no definite evidence showing that listening strategy training can enhance learners' listening performance. What's more, these studies are mainly conducted in the laboratory settings by researchers and the subjects are mainly first language or second language learners. In China, according to Liu Renqing&Dai Manchun'(2003,ed)survey on learning strategy, papers on listening strategy training are rare to find and papers concerning how to carry out a listening strategy training in school settings are rarer. So based on these facts, the author conducts a fourteen-week experiment for the college students to test whether or not listening strategy training can enhance EFL learners' listening performance better than the traditional teaching methods do in a typical school setting.The author first reviews the literature concerning listening comprehension, learning strategy, listening strategy and strategy training, and then works out a four-step strategy training model based on Oxford(1990) and Chamot&O'Malley'(1994) training models. On the basis of that model, the author implements a strategy training experiment. The subjects are 200 sophomores majoringin Chinese the author is teaching. They are divided into two groups i.e. experimental group and control group. According to t-test of the means of their pre-experiment test scores, there is no significant difference between these two groups. The experiment consists of a descriptive study and an interventionist study. In the descriptive study, the author puts forward three research questions, i.e. what are the major difficulties the students encounter in listening? What are the major factors affecting students' listening comprehension? What are the strategies students have already used in listening? Based on the analysis of the data collected, the author selects eight strategies for strategy training. These eight strategies are inferening, elaboration, imagery, note-taking, planning, selective attention, self-evaluation and cooperation. In the interventionist study, the author first raises a research hypothesis: listening strategy training can enhance EFL learners' listening performance better than the traditional teaching methods do in a typical school setting. Then the author implements a fourteen-week SBI for the experimental group while teaching the control group in the traditional way. Fourteen weeks later, students both in experimental group and control group take a post-experiment test. The results of t-test show the difference between the means of the control group and the experimental group in the post-test is statistically significant which confirms research hypothesis.