An Investigation On Learning Strategies Employed By College Students In English Listening Comprehension

Listening comprehension plays an important role both in daily communication and in second language acquisition and learning. Our newly issued document "The Requirement for College English Teaching (the pilot one)"emphasizes the cultivation of college students'listening comprehension abilities under current situations. Many studies have been made by the previous researchers on listening comprehension, among which the number of those studies on learning strategies employed by college students is relatively small, especially that of the studies involving the comparison of the use of learning strategies between good and poor listeners is very limited and there are no studies concerning the relationship between learning strategies and gender or that between learning strategies and extroversion/introversion. So it is very necessary to carry out this study. The study aims to find out learning strategies employed by Chinese college non-English majors in listening comprehension, the differences in the employment of learning strategies between good and poor listeners, the relationship between learning strategies and gender as well as that between learning strategies and extroversion/introversion. 112 second-year non-English majors from Shandong Normal University were taken as the subjects. Three instruments were used in the study. They were one learning strategy questionnaire, the subjects'final examination paper (listening comprehension part) and a compound dictation given by the researcher. The investigation adopted a person-administered mode. It began with the distribution of the questionnaires to the subjects on the morning of June 10th, 2004. The students were required to fulfill and hand in the questionnaire on the spot. Then the compound dictation was given to the subjects. One week later, the researcher made an interview in the students'classroom, which involved 21 students. The subjects participated in the final examination on June 20th, 2004 and their marks for the listening comprehension part were received on July 3rd. The data has been keyed into the computer and analyzed by the SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) version 10.0 statistical program. Means, standard deviations and independent-samples t-tests are used in this investigation. The results are presented as follows: 1. In English listening comprehension, Chinese college non-English majors in general employ a variety of learning strategies at a medium frequency level. Among the three major strategies, they frequently use cognitive strategies, and sometimes use metacognitive strategies and social/ affective strategies. As far as the subcategories of learning strategies are concerned, they frequently use directed attention, selective attention, key-word method, inferencing, elaboration, note-taking and translation, sometimes use self-management, self-monitoring, transfer, self-evaluation, self-reinforcement, self-talk and questioning for clarification and seldom use planning and cooperation. 2. As far as good listeners and poor listeners are concerned, they are significantly different on the use of learning strategies. The differences are statistically significant between good and poor listeners on the use of metacognitive strategies as well as cognitive strategies, but not social/affective strategies. Those subcategories with the significant differences of their use between good and poor listeners are listed as follows: planning, self-management, self-monitoring, selective attention, self-evaluation and inferencing. 3. Female students use metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and...