A Study On The Relationship Between Listening Strategy Use And Listening Proficiency (English Major Students)

With the rapid development of cognitive psychology in 1970s, researchers on second language acquisition gradually shifted their research focus to the study of learners and how they acquire knowledge, and started research on learning strategy.Learning strategy research has a rather short history of about 40 years. American linguist Rubin (1975) is generally thought as the leading researcher in the field for her famous paper on "good language learner" published in TESOL Quarterly. From then on, much more researchers start to conduct studies in this area and these studies indicate that foreign language learners employ certain strategies to enhance their learning. What's more, some researchers have pointed out that there exist certain relationship between the learning strategies used by learners and the language proficiency they have achieved, for example, more proficient learners demonstrate a greater variety of strategy use (Oxford, 1990; Oxford & Burry-Stock, 1995) and coordinate their strategy use more effectively than their less proficient peers do (Chamot & O'Malley, 2001; Vann & Abraham, 1990). However, some other researchers (Skehan, 1989; Rees-Miller, 1993) believe that the evidence for the correlation between strategy use and learning proficiency is not enough to prove that the two variables are positively related to each other.After a general examination of the literature on foreign language acquisition in the past decade, I find that there are only a few researchers who have engaged in empirical studies on listening strategy use by learners, especially in China. Therefore, the present study is conducted, aiming at: 1) investigating the status quo of listening strategy use of English-major students (third year); 2) examining the differences of listening strategy use between effective listeners and ineffective listeners; 3) discovering the possible relationship between listening strategy use and listening proficiency.The thesis first briefly introduces the background of research on second language learning strategies, the purpose and hypothesis of this study. Secondly, it reviews the related theory and literature. It first demonstrates the cognitive process of listening...