A Study Of The Relationship Between Listening Strategies And Listening Performances Of Middle School Students

Listening is an active mental process, in which a listener tries to understand the listening materials with the help of listening strategies and kinds of knowledge. In theory, knowledge of language (pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary and grammar) and background (cultural differences and different subjects) is an important factor to influence a middle school student's listening performance. The more knowledge of language and background he has, the better he can accomplish the listening task.Students' listening ability depends much on their knowledge of language and background. However, a medium is needed in order to turn students' knowledge into listening ability. Listening strategies, i.e. metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies, can help them to achieve the purpose. Metacognitve strategies refer to strategies of advance preparation, directed attention, selective attention, self-management, self-monitoring and self-evaluation. Cognitive strategies mainly include strategies of inferencing, translation, elaboration, transfer, note-taking, contextualisation and keyword-using. Social/affective strategies refer to strategies of cooperation and self-talk.This thesis endeavours to analyze the relationship between the listening strategies and listening performances of middle school students by means of questionnaires. The results of research on how much knowledge middle school students acquire and on what listening strategies they often use show that listening strategies, especially the strategies of directed attention, selective attention, self-management, self-evaluation, elaboration, transfer, note-taking, contextualisation, keyword-using and self-talk, often play a major role in students' achievements of listening comprehension.The analysis above indicates that English listening teaching in middle schools should aim at what English listening is, what students should prepare for listeningand how English teachers should train students' listening strategies. In other words, both middle school English teachers and students should understand fully the importance and essence of English listening; English listening teaching should be combined with kinds of English teaching such as vocabulary teaching, grammar teaching, phonetics teaching and reading teaching; teachers should train students' ability of self-planning, self-instruction and self-evaluation in the pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening processes.