A Study Of Listening Strategies Employed By Non-English Majors In A Chinese University

Research on language learning strategy use of L2 has aroused more and more attention in language education ever since the 1970s. Of all studies on language learning strategies, listening comprehension strategy research has been given an increasing concern by many researchers. However, most of these studies were conducted in Western countries, and only a few of them took place in China. To have a better understanding of how students use listening strategies in the Chinese context, we need to carry out further investigations and provide more valid findings in this area.The present study aims to find out listening strategies employed by Chinese college non-English majors in listening comprehension. It attempts to compare the differences in the employment of listening strategies between good and poor listeners, and explore the effect of gender on students'use of listening strategies. The ultimate purpose of this research is to find some tendency in the use of listening strategy by this group of Chinese learners, and provide some guidance for the students to improve their listening comprehension in the future.120 second-year non-English majors from Jiangxi Normal University were selected as the subjects. Of all these subjects, 37 were females (30.8%) and 83 were males (69.2%). Two instruments were used in the study to collect relevant data. They were listening strategy questionnaire and the listening comprehension part of CET-4 examination. The subjects were first asked to take the listening test, and then they were asked to fill in a listening strategy questionnaire. With the help of statistical analytic tool SPSS 10.0, descriptive statistics was obtained concerning the minimum and maximum scores, means and standard deviations in their listening strategy use. The Independent Sample T test was employed to compare the differences in listening strategy use by gender and English proficiency level.This study revealed several findings regarding the students'use of listening strategies. First, the subjects of this investigation, as a whole, employ a variety of listening strategies at a medium frequency level. Of the three major strategies, they frequently use cognitive strategies, and sometimes use metacognitive strategies and social/affective strategies. Secondly, good listeners of this investigation tend to use all the three major listening strategies more frequently in listening activities than poor ones. The statistically significant differences between them are on the use of metacognitive strategies and cognitive strategies. The significant differences in the use of subcategory strategies between good and poor listeners are planning, self-initiation, self-monitoring, evaluation, inferencing and prediction. Finally, female students use metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies more often than male students, but only the difference in the use of social/affective strategies reached the significant level.Based on the major findings above, several pedagogical implications are offered for EFL teachers in Chinese universities. To help students use listening strategies effectively, teachers should make their students have a comprehensive system of knowledge about listening tasks and listening strategies. They should cultivate students'awareness of using learning strategies in English listening comprehension, and encourage students to use metacognitive strategies as well as social/affective strategies. When teaching learning strategies in listening class, teachers should also take gender factor into consideration.