A Study Of English Listening Strategy Training From The Perspective Of Information Processing Theory

Many researches have demonstrated that listening is the core of daily communication activities (Morley, 1984; Rost, 1990) and one of the important means to acquire comprehensible input for learners (Krashen, 1981). While it is an aspect often neglected in the language acquiring process (Feyten, 1991), listening is the most difficult skill to be mastered in the foreign language acquisition. The listening ability affects their whole language ability development seriously.Since the middle of 1980s, researchers began to focus on the learners' learning style, learning strategies and personal factors, which play an initiative function in the language learning process. Correspondingly the research center of Western foreign language teaching shifted from "how to teach" to "how to learn". Learning strategies become the hot spot of our research. Up to now, the research mainly focus on observing the function exerted on the whole learning process, the studies that research on listening strategies are relatively limited, although studies on listening strategies training is becoming more and more active. The results are different, but most researches have confirmed that strategy training is indeed beneficial to improving the listening scores, reinforcing the consciousness of using strategies, learning motivation and learning autonomy (Brown & Palinscar, 1982; Chamot et al., 1996; Fujiwara, 1990; Thompson & Rubin, 1996). They concluded that strategy training should be an integral part of the listening course, which is also helpful to reforming our college English listening teaching.These Western studies are mainly conducted in the laboratory settings by researchers and the subjects are mainly first language or second language learners. In China, papers on listening strategy training are rare to find, and papers concerning how to carry out a listening-strategy training in school setting are rarer. Therefore, based on these facts, the author conducts a ten-week experiment for the college students to test whether or not listening strategy training can enhance EFL listeners' listening performance better than the traditional teaching method.The author first reviews the literature concerning listening comprehension, listening strategy and listening strategy training. Then making use of some useful factors of the Chamot & O'Malley's training model (1994), we work out a six-step strategy-training model, which is mainly based on Oxford's training model (1990). Following that, the author implements a strategy training experiment, whose basis is the six-step strategy-training model. The subjects are 130 sophomores majoring in Chinese chosen randomly by us. We assign them into 3 classes, then appoint one class to the control group, another class to the experimental group, and the rest one is used as the consult group. In order to fully demonstrate that the listening strategy training can really enhance EFL learners' listening performance better than the traditional teaching method, it needs 2 tests for both pre-experiment and post-experiment to contrast the students' scores. The test paper for both tests are consistent with each other in the degree of difficulty is very crucial for the experiment result. For this reason, the author designs the consult group. Before the experiment commenced, the consult group firstly takes the test. Through paired sample t-test, we discovered that there is no significant difference among the students' average scores, which demonstrates that the two papers could be equal in the degree of difficulty. Following that, these two groups receive the pre-experiment tests, 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. (1) What are the major difficulties the students encounter in listening? (2) What are the major factors affecting students' listening comprehension? (3) What are the strategies students have already used in listening? Based on the analysis of the data collected and considering which learning strategies are correlated with the pre-experiment test scores, the author selects 11 strategies for the strategy training. These strategies are inferencing, elaboration, imagery, note-taking, planning, self-management, self-evaluation, self-monitoring, selective attention, cooperation, lessen one's anxiety with self-talk.In the interventionist study, the author firstly raises a research hypothesis that listening strategy training can enhance EFL learners' listening performance better than the traditional teaching method does and the low-level students improve more than the competent students. Then the author implements a 10 week SBI for the experimental group while teaching the control group in the traditional way. Ten weeks later, students from both the experimental group and control group take a post-experiment test. The results of t-test show the difference between the average score of the control group and the experimental group in the post-test is statistically significant which confirms the research hypothesis.