Studies On Listening Strategies And Teaching Of Listening In Middle School ESL Classrooms

Due to the importance of listening comprehension among the four basic foreign/second language acquisition skills, considerable attention has been given to the pedagogic method of improving listeners' proficiency.In China, there exist some problems in English listening class in Middle School. Professor Wang zhongyan said: "In listening class, It is not unusual that teachers just play records without offering any hints". In the listening class, listeners are only viewed as passive receivers without any hints. After listeners listen one or two times, teachers check the answers, and then play the tape sentence by sentence. However, listening comprehension is an active process.This paper takes up the guidance of listening strategies to the teaching of listening as its topic to study. It aims at studying the teaching elements:1) Which factor affects the students' listening comprehension?2) What are the effects of practicing listening strategies?3) Are there any differences in using listening strategies among the listeners of different learning styles?First of the paper reports a study on the factors which affect listening comprehension.In the experiment, it contrasted students from Class One and Class Two , Grade Three in our school.There were three questionnaires used in the study for data collection: one of them is Some Factors Affecting the Students' Listening Comprehension(SFASLC), and the other is Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) including metacognitive strategies, cognitive strateges and social strategies; and the last one is Perceptual Learning Style Preference Survey (PLSPS) which consists of visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, individual and group styles.It used quantitative studies to identify the results of the experiment with listening test, comparative studies and questionnaire surveys.Before experiment, all the students took an English listening comprehension test and t-test showed there were no apparent differences between the two classes.Then the students of Class One received listening strategies (including metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social strategies) , whereas those students of Class Two did not have listening training .After four month'sexperiment, t-test showed the difference between the means of Class One and Class Two.The major findings presented in the paper are as follows:First, among all the factors that affecting listening comprehension, phonetics and vocabulary have the most significant effects on the listeners.Second, the experiment has demonstrated that listening strategies(involving the teaching of metacognitive, cognitive and social strategies) taught in class really improved students' listening comprehension.Third, the experiment also demonstrated the use of strategies and the effectiveness of strategy use are closely related to the learning styles of the students.In the light of the findings, the thesis suggests that teachers teach phonetics in the middle schools of China, especially in the initial stage and teach the basic ways of learning vocabulary. In the meantime, teachers encourage students to develop the suitable listening strategies such as metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social /affective strategies so as to facilitate their listening comprehension. Teachers make language learners aware of their own learning styles preferences (i.e. their major styles and minor styles ) and understand the advantages and disadvantages of different learning styles so as to maximize their initiatives in learning.