The Application Of Strategy-based Instruction In Teaching College English Listening

According to the English teaching curriculum in 1999, average hours college students spend on learning English is up to 1100 hours. However, the effect has been far from satisfying. Due to poor knowledge of language and strategy, it is a great challenge for non-English majors to improve listening ability. Students always took it for granted that it is the teacher who should take responsibility for their study. They have no idea what methods would be effective in listening, let alone making systematical plan to train themselves in using strategies to improve their listening. In 2002, Chinese Foreign Language Education Research Center made an investigation among 900 teachers in 48 different colleges. According to the result of the questionnaire, 25.9% of the teachers reckoned that "have no learning methods" is one of the major reasons in students' learning of listening and this problem ranked three among all of the listed problems (the first is " study for exams " :60.2%; the second is "poor language background" :38.2%). It indicates that we teachers should change the teaching concept, help and train students to use strategies. It is a new road if we can combine strategy training and daily teaching together.Influenced by the traditional Chinese way of teaching, many teachers and students tend to believe that poor improvement of listening only due to inadequate practice. Traditionally, it is widely accepted that learners will pick up listening comprehension rather than being taught explicitly. In class, the teacher has not taught learners how to listen, but simply provided them with exposure to various auditory and visual inputs. The teacher has focused too much on the product of listening and too little on the process. While it is true that exposure to spoken language will improve listener's ability, teaching learners how to solve a listening task by using an array of strategies will lead to better comprehension. In listening strategy instruction, an effective way to direct learners towards efficient use of listening strategies is to adopt a strategy-based approach to integrate strategy instruction into regular listening lesson (Mendelsohn, 1994). In recent years, the strategy-based instruction has been suggested as an innovation on language teaching. Previous studies have also successfully identified strategies used by L2 listeners ranging from cognitive strategies, metacognitive strategies to social/affective strategies (O'Malley, Chamot, & Kupper 1989; Vandergrift 1997, 2003; Goh 1998; 2002). Among these strategies, the most common strategies reported by L2 listeners include inferencing, elaboration, translation, contextualization, comprehension monitoring, planning/evaluation, and self-encouragement. These studies have shed great insights on our understanding of what students do or fail to do in order to achieve comprehension during the process of listening. In addition, many researches have reported positive effects of listening teaching through this approach. This paper utters for strategy-based instruction towards teaching listening in China. The writer thinks that more attention should be paid on process rather than the product during the training of strategy-use. If use of listening strategies is understood as learners' conscious effort toward the improvement of listening comprehension, then this neglect needs to be addressed in order to help Chinese learners become better listeners. It makes efforts to discover the problems in strategy use among students. By doing so, it hopes to provide a general idea of what these students do when engaged in listening tasks so as to strengthen our understanding of strategy use among Chinese listeners. In another word, strategies are most successful when they are practiced consciously and systematically. However, no single set of strategies works for all tasks. Students need to apply strategies that work for them. Language teacher must teach learners to be more aware of their learning strategies and instruct them to apply these strategies into the learning.This paper hopes to offer some ideas about how to apply strategy instructions in everyday activities, how to positively reinforce the effective use of strategies, and how to encourage them to find ways to take more responsibility for listening. The subjects of the paper are first-year non-English majors of two college English teachers. Teacher A applied strategy-based instruction in teaching listening from the first semester of college while Teacher B did not. The writer made investigation through questionnaires on students' use of learning strategies and analyzed the data on students' exams with and without strategy-use training. Hence, the writer believes that students' conscious use of strategies will make strategies more effective. However, single strategy can not work in all kinds of listening tasks and it is up to the students to choose proper strategies. The task of our language teachers is to pay more attention to the learning process of strategies, to raise their awareness on strategy-use, to train their in applying strategies, to encourage them to find proper study methods and take the responsibility of their own listening. The writer also reckons that explicit and integrated instruction is more effective than the implicit and separate, for the ultimate goal of strategy instruction is to let students use strategies consciously and systematically.