An Empirical Study On Listening Strategies Of HVC Non-English Majors

A successful English learner is supposed to grasp five basic skills, listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Among these five basic skills, listening is absolutely playing an important role in communication. People can't offer an appropriate response until they fully understand what others intend to express in their speaking. For the HVC students, listening is much more difficult since their English ability is not higher.This paper conducts an empirical study on 106 HVC students in LUIBE who are divided into the control group and the experimental group,53 students in each group. First, all of the participants are required to answer a questionnaire on the listening strategy employment which is designed according to some researchers in their former study and revised especially for the participants in this experiment. The results show there are no significant differences in students'strategy use between the control group and the experimental group. Second, a pre-test is taken among all of the participants. The pre-test scores in both groups are not quite satisfying, especially the listening comprehension in blank-filling part. More than 65% tudents get zero in this part. Therefore, the researcher designs a 14-week listening strategy training process among the experimental group, five listening strategies are included, selective attention, inferencing, elaboration, note-taking and key words. At the end of the experiment, a post-test is taken among the participants. The results of the post-test show the participants in the experimental group have got a higher score compared with the control group, especially in the blank-filling part. At last, there is an interview among the participants in the experimental group who are believed to be the successful learners because their scores of the blank-filling part have been greatly improved through the experiment. By giving this interview a conclusion can be drawn that note-taking, selective attention, inferencing and key words listening strategies improve the students' listening ability better when they are completing the blank-filling part in PRETCO Level A.