A Research On English Listening Strategies Employed In Vocational Schools

The aim of studying English is to train the students'ability of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. In these five abilities,listening is the most important and difficult one to learn. We must pay enough attention to listening if we want to enhance English teaching quality. This paper mainly explores the listening strategies employed by vocational school students and attempts to find out if the listening strategy training can really help improve students'listening ability.At the beginning of this study, the author made an investigation on listening strategies through questionnaires among students of two classes in Grade Two in Qingdao Electronics School. The author chose two classes, Class Five and Class Two, as the subjects of the study. It was found that there were no significant differences in the students'listening strategies. Then Class Two was treated as the experimental class and Class Five as the control class. After that the author conducted a pre-test in the two classes. The result showed that there were no significant differences between the two classes in the students'listening comprehension. When this was done, the author carefully chose five strategies for training among the students in the experimental class. They are inference, selective attention, note-taking, self-monitoring and cooperation strategies. The period for strategy training was 20 weeks. At the end of the study, a post-test was made in the two classes and the students'listening comprehension scores were analyzed. The results of the study showed that the students in the experimental class outperformed the students in the control class in their listening comprehension. Therefore, we can conclude that listening strategy training can improve the students'listening comprehension.The thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One is a literature review of the research on listening strategies. Both in foreign countries and in China, researchers have made great contributions to the studies of learning strategies in listening comprehension.Chapter Two outlines the related theories on listening comprehension and listening strategies, which provides theoretical supports for this study.Chapter Three presents a detailed description of the way this study is conducted, which contains the experiment, data-collection and data-analysis.Chapter Four reports and discusses the results of the study. The results show that the students who have strategy training outperform those who haven not in their listening comprehension.Chapter Five gives the implications and suggestions. It first expounds the implications obtained from the results of the study. And based on the findings of this study, integrating with the practical classroom situation, the author of the thesis put forward some suggestions on the teaching of listening in vocational schools. For example, in the daily classroom teaching, all the English teachers in vocational schools should pay more attention to the students'learning strategies and be familiar with the strategy use of the students. And then they might promote the students'listening comprehension ability and improve the teaching of English listening in vocational schools by training them how to employ various listening comprehension strategies.It is assumed that the study may provide a truthful description of listening strategies used by vocational school students and offer helpful suggestions to the teaching of listening and the improvement of listeners'abilities.