Listening Strategy Training And English Listening Instruction In Senior Middle School

Listening is one of the skills in language learning. Thomas Scovel (2000) considers listening as an active process which includes attending, understanding, remembering and evaluating. It is a complex process which involves all sorts of knowledge and competence relevant to listening and strategy modes, in which top-down and bottom-up are regarded as two basic ones. However, the combined mode after that is widely received.The correlative researches abroad have showed that metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social / affective strategies which are advocated by O'Malley & Chamot (1990) are the three main aspects of listening strategies. These listening strategies are applied by many listening teachers. Metacognitive strategies involve planning and thinking about learning, such as planning one's learning, monitoring one's own speech and evaluating how well one has done; cognitive strategies involve conscious ways of tackling learning, such as note-taking; social strategies mean learning by interacting with others, such as working with fellow students or asking for the teacher's help and affective strategies mean how to lower their anxieties while listening. According to the experiments and the researches, people find out that listeners can apply some strategies to enhance their listening comprehension, such as self-monitoring, selective attention, prediction, inference, empathy, and cooperating with others. The research on listening strategies in our country are mainly carried out in colleges or universities. Wen Qiufang, Su Dingfang and Liu Shaolong, etc, point out that it is significant to improve listening comprehension by applying cognitive strategies and metacognitive strategies. Listening is an important part of English teaching in senior middle school. It has been paid wide attention to since 2001,when listening was regarded as an important part of the national entrance examination. Meanwhile, the current situation of English listening teaching in senior middle school is not satisfactory. Students, instead of learning skills to improve their listening ability, are exposed to the listening test. They may slowly lose their interest in listening after a long time. If students are not "stirred up" to take the initiative inthe listening activities, they can hardly get of the listening "vicious circle" with its goal of test. Therefore, listening should be taught in an autonomous, ease and interesting environment and students, directed by their teacher, should engage in self-diagnosis, self-assessment and self-instruction for their study. In other words, the teacher should encourage students to 'learn how to learn' and 'learn how to use' English.The thesis gives an exploring analysis to the current situation of listening in senior middle school and according to the application of listening strategies, it gives a restricted view on the problems which remain in listening teaching and tries to probe the suitable teaching methods and learning modes.In order to explore the importance and the effectiveness of listening strategies on listening in senior middle school and try to find a suitable way of listening strategy training, the author has conducted two questionnaires among the students early or late and an experiment of listening strategy training which lasted two terms. The statistics of two questionnaires show that students know little about listening strategies but they are eager to apply strategies to listening tasks. The subjects of the experiment came from a senior middle school. They were trained how to use listening strategies in listening practice, such as making plans, self- monitoring, predicting and evaluating. The result of the experiment is satisfactory ─ the subjects can use the strategies effectively to help them in listening comprehension.According to the results of the questionnaires and the experiment and her teaching experience, the author discusses the concrete ways of listening strategy training and points out that the roles of the teacher are very important i...