A Study On English Listening Strategies In Web-based Teaching Environment

Listening comprehension plays an important role both in daily communication and in second language acquisition. The newly issued document The College English Curriculum Requirements (2004) emphasizes on the cultivation of college students'listening abilities under current situations. The domestic and foreign studies on listening strategy tend to be more intensive. However, few studies involve the comparison of strategy use between good listeners and poor listeners in web-based English teaching environment.This research, in the current teaching situation in Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), aims to find out listening strategies employed by Chinese college non-English majors in the process of listening comprehension, the differences in the employment of listening strategies between good listeners and poor listeners.The participants in this study are 74 non-English major freshmen of intermediate level, who have been studying in the web-based environment for a year in Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. They were selected out by their performance in a mid-term examination. Data in this research were collected by means of a questionnaire, which was based on O'Malley and Chamot's classification, tailor-made by the author, and processed by SPSS (11.0).Detailed analysis of quantitative data has generated the following findings: (1) In the listening comprehension activities, as a whole, Chinese college non-English majors sometimes use learning strategies to aid their listening comprehension. (2) Among the three major strategies, meta-cognitive strategies are those of least used by the participants when attending the web-based autonomous learning session. Cognitive strategies are most frequently employed by the participants, as well as social/affective strategies. (3) As far as the subcategories are concerned, they frequently apply repetition, transfer, prediction, selective listening, interest-raising and self-confidence strategies. They do not often use self-management, note-taking, keyword method, oral presentation, comprehending by segments, material selection and translation strategies. (4) Good listeners use all strategies more frequently than poor listeners. The difference in social/affective strategy use is at significant level. Those subcategories with significant differences of their use between good listeners and poor ones are material selection and interest-raising strategies.The analysis in this study yields significant pedagogical implications with regard to reinforcing the students'abilities in independent listening: (1) Start strategy training program to cultivate students'awareness of using learning strategies in English listening comprehension; (2) Encourage students to use meta-cognitive strategies in such a combination of face-to-face instruction and autonomous learning in net; (3) Encourage students to use social/affective strategies, especially to cooperate with others; (4) Enable the students to select listening materials appropriate to their levels.