An Empirical Study On English Majors' Out-of-Class Listening

Since the 20th century, the theory of autonomy has been very popular in the world. It is strongly believed and advocated that learners should do their independent studies for more effective and productive learning. Learners'autonomy is especially important in listening improvement because Listening needs large amount of acoustic input and effort-and-time-consuming acquisition. Listening involves many processes in neurology, linguistics, schema, psychology, etc. listening is especially difficult for the second language learners because of its unfamiliarity from the L1 and demanding of a large input over time. Listening practice is a do-it-yourself project. Taking this and limited time of classroom practice, out-of-class practice is of extreme importance for learners in the process of listening improvement.The theory of listening and autonomy in listening tell us that the starting point for students in listening improvement is to take action first and then other functioning elements such as cognitive strategies training, schema construction, and pragmatic processing can have their opportunities to play roles. So in order to bring about effective teaching that causes effective learning, first of all, teachers should understand how their students are learning, which is just the aim of this paper. From this and for this, this paper continues to do an empirical study using questionnaire and interview techniques to collect data from students and teachers about students'out-of-class listening in the context of the foreign language department of Changchun Taxation College. The results are not encouraging; on the contrary, they are shocking. The learners do not do a lot of listening practice after class. Based on the data analysis, it is concluded that teachers should do something to guarantee that their students really do listening practice. Teachers'roles and authority are still of great importance and they are required to guide and discipline learners for their out-of-class independent learning, especially in the process of being autonomous, when their autonomy has not been established.The paper has only studied the context of the foreign language department at Changchun Taxation College. So the results are contextually limited. Also, students'out-of-class listening is comprehensive and complicated, so it is difficult to cover everything in the study. However, scientific research progresses by moving beyond limitations and moves further for deeper and wider exploration. Thus, the study will continue in two directions: English majors'out-of-class listening in other colleges and universities, and what to do for effective out-of-class listening. It is hoped that this paper and future further work can make contributions to the teaching of English listening in China.