An Investigation Of Listening Comprehension Strategies Used By University Students In Science And Engineering

Listening comprehension plays a significant role in our daily communication. Many researchers both abroad and at home have carried out a lot of researches concerning listening comprehension. However, among them the number of those studies about listening strategies is relatively small, especially that of the studies selecting unversity stuudents in science and engineering as subjects is rather limited. So it is necessary to carry out this study.The investigation aims to learn about the use of listening strategies employed by university students in science and engineering in listening comprehension.200 sophomores from four departments of Xi'an Technological University are selected as the subjects. One listening strategy questionnaire and interview are adopted as the instruments. The collected data is analyzed by the SPSS 10.0 statistical programs. The results are as follows:1. According to the results of correlation, all the three main categories of metacognitive, cognitive, social/affective strategies have significant relationship with their listening achievements. Out of the 21 items of the listening strategies 15 showed significant relationship with their scores.2. In listening comprehension, university students in science and engineering use listening strategies to help them strengthen their listening abilities at a middle level. Among the three major strategies, the cognitive strategies are used in listening activities most frequently, metacognitive strategies tend to be used sometimes and social/affective strategies are seldom used to them.3. Concerning the top listeners and under-achievers, there are significant differences on the use of the listening strategies. Among these main three large strategies, the uses of matecognitive and cognitive strategies are significant different, but there is no significant difference in the use of social/affective strategies. Among 21 listening substratigies,10 substrategies show significant difference, which are planning, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-management, elaboration, inferencing, summarization, imagery, hypnosis-testing, questions for clarification respectively.Based on the findings of the study, several implications are put forward:1) Teachers should cultivate listeners to enhance the awareness of using learning strategies in English listening comprehension as soon as possible; 2) Teachers should encourage students to use metacognitive strategies and social/affective strategies.3) Teachers should take the different needs of students with different abilities and the different effectiveness of strategies in achievement into account. And limitations and suggestions for future research are presented in the end.