A New Approach To Improving Non-English Majors' Listening Ability

This study is undertaken to make an investigation into the non-English majors' problems in compound dictation,and then to improve their performance in compound dictation through listening strategy training,and finally develop the students' strategy use awareness and listening comprehension ability.Listening is a conscious process involving the use of various knowledge and multiple strategies.Listening strategy training has assumed great importance in that it can stimulate the listeners' interest and promote the listeners' autonomy.However,listening comprehension is a relatively late concern in foreign language teaching,compared with the other three basic skills.The teachers in China do not pay enough emphasis on listening strategy training in listening class.In addition,compound dictation is a relatively new testing item in national College English Test(CET),students show less experience and more difficulty.The situation described above gives rise to the present research.The following research questions are addressed in this thesis:(1) what are the difficulties in compound dictation listening for non-English majors?(2) how can we conduct listening strategy training to improve students' compound dictation and finally listening ability?This thesis makes an attempt to discuss the nature and process of listening comprehension,definition and classification of listening strategies and listening strategy training.Under the framework of cognitive linguistics,Anderson differentiates comprehension into three processes:perceptual processing,parsing and utilization.Some researchers like O'Malley and Chamot,Oxford and Cohen put forward their own definition and classification of learning strategies.Vandergrift's classification of listening strategies is directly derived from the previous study of listening comprehension and listening strategies.All these studies paved the way for the present study.This thesis is a tentative study of improving the students' performance in compound dictation from the viewpoint of listening strategy training.To be specific,it intends to investigate the students' difficulties and strategy use in compound dictation with questionnaire,and then try to deal with these problems through strategy training.The participants of the study are 64 non-English major sophomores from Huazhong Normal University,an experimental group and a control group.The experimental group is first required to finish a questionnaire about their difficulties and strategy use in compound dictation.After an analysis of their answers of the questionnaire,the author selects a number of cognitive listening strategies to instruct to the experimental group in listening class,while the control group has the usual listening guidance with no treatment of organized listening strategy training.Both the control group and the experimental group receive a pre-training test and a post-training test.The statistics of the study are processed by SPSS 16.0(version 16 of Statistical Package of Social Science).The results of the questionnaire find a very low mean of listening strategies use in compound dictation,and also show that a half of top ten difficulties that students have are due to low frequency use of cognitive strategies.The analysis of pretest and posttest by SPSS 16.0 indicates that with cognitive listening strategy training,the experimental group gets statistically significant progress in compound dictation.The statistical results prove that strategy training have positive effect on students' listening comprehension ability.A number of implications for listening strategy training and the development of listening comprehension ability are derived from the study:(1) Teachers should have intense and comprehensive knowledge about listening strategies before they are going to implement any strategy training;(2) Questionnaire,interview or observation should be carried out before the training to identify the students' current use of listening strategies; (3) It is important to cultivate the students' awareness of using listening strategies of the learners;(4) Strategy training should be included in the regular teaching process and integrated into the listening task;(5) Successful guidance and training of listening strategies requires the students' active involvement.