A Study On Relationships Between Listening Strategy Use And Autonomous Learning Effects

Listening is one of the five fundamental skills in English teaching. People learn language through a lot of comprehensible input, and listening is an important channel of comprehensible input. At the same time, in the five skills of English (listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation), listening is in the first place. On the basis of theories and researches of listening strategies and autonomous learning, the present study explains the relationship between listening strategies and autonomous learning and it also proposes the use of listening strategies and the model of strategy instruction for the improvement of autonomous learning.The subjects of this study are 205 non-English major sophomores in North University of China. Two adaptable questionnaires are used to collect relevant data which are listening strategy use questionnaire and autonomous learning questionnaire. The questionnaire of listening strategy use is composed of three main strategies (metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies) and twenty-two subcategories, and questionnaire of autonomous learning includes six aspects which are divided into thirty-five items. The author gains frequencies, means and standard deviations by SPSS to analyze the situations of the two aspects. It is hypothesized that the three strategies should have different functions which influenced in the process of improving autonomous learning, so this study uses multiple regression to test the relationship between listening strategies and autonomous learning.Results from this study show that firstly the frequency of strategy use stays at a medium level, and students frequently use cognitive strategies, sometimes use metacognitive strategies and rarely use social/affective strategies. Secondly, the overall degree of autonomous learning in listening comprehension stays at a low level. Many students do not evaluate their learning and not select and use appropriate listening strategies, even a lot of students are not able to understand the roles of students and teachers in autonomous learning. Thirdly, this study demonstrates the significant relationships between listening strategies and autonomous learning, meanwhile, metacognitive strategies influence the autonomous learning greatly, the next is social/affective strategies and the last one is cognitive strategies.Based on all the investigations and analyses, the author puts forward some pedagogical implications which might be beneficial for the autonomous learning through the strategy use training. Firstly, teachers should foster the awareness of listening strategy use and encourage students to use strategies during the listening comprehension. Secondly, according to different functions of the three strategies, teachers should conduct strategy use and enhance the use of metacognitive and social/affective strategies, meanwhile, not ignoring the use of cognitive strategies. Thirdly, as for the problem of the roles between teachers and students in autonomous learning, teachers should enable students to make sure their central part of learning and guiding roles of teachers. In the meanwhile, students are encouraged to take part in the listening task in order to arouse the initiative of learning, in the end, achieving the autonomous learning in the process of listening comprehension.