A Survey Of Listening Strategies Employed By Senior High School Students

Listening strategies are generally regarded as a kind of learning strategies. According to Cohen (1998), listening strategies are mental operations or processes that learners consciously select when accomplishing language tasks. As learning strategies, listening strategies are divided into three categories, which are metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies (O'Malley & Chamot, 1990). Each of these three strategies constitutes some specific strategies, such as self–monitoring, selective attention, inferring etc. A number of researchers ( Su Dingfang, 1996 and Liu Shaolun 1996,etc.) have pointed out that listening strategies can enhance students'listening comprehension. Many researches conducted in and outside China have shown that effective listeners use listening strategies more frequently than less effective listeners (Murphy, 1985,Chamot and kupper, 1989 and Jiang Zukang, 1994 etc.)This thesis is a survey of listening strategies employed by senior high school students. One of the aims is to verify whether listening strategies have substantive relationships with listening comprehension achievement. The other aim is to verify whether more proficient students use listening strategies more frequently than less proficient students. And another aim is to investigate what kinds of listening strategies are used more frequently by the students of high-score group. The subjects are 100 students in grade three in two classes from Tumd middle school in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. Three investigation tools were used in the study, including questionnaire, interview and a listening test. The listening test and questionnaire were finished in the same class within 45 minutes. The SPSS 10.0 was used to analyze the data after the listening test and the questionnaire. According to the scores they gained in the listening test, students were divided into the high–score group and the low-score group. Interviews were conducted to investigate the students'use of listening strategies. Eight students were randomly selected to take part in the interview, including four more proficient students and four less proficient students. The questionnaire and interview results are basically consistent with the hypotheses. First, all listening strategies including metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, and social/affective strategies were found significantly related to the listening achievement. Second, the result shows that the metacognitive strategies were used more often thanthe cognitive and social/affective strategies. The students of high-score group were found to employ metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies more frequently than the students of the low-score group. Third, ten such listening strategies as advance organization & self-monitoring were found most frequently used by the students of high-score group.These findings of the survey have great implications to the classroom teaching of listening. Listening strategy training, especially the training of cognitive strategies and social /affective strategies, is hoped to be conducted frequently in the listening class. Based on the findings of this study, integrating with the practical classroom situation, the author of the thesis put forward some suggestions on the teaching of listening in the class of senior high school. First, the senior high school teachers of English should organize strategy training in proper pedagogical sequence. A pedagogical sequence that guides students in learning the strategies may be most suitable for nurturing the strategy awareness at first, and then modeling the use of each strategy, and finally having students deploy the strategies independently. Second, they should create enough opportunities for students to practice key strategies, such as self-monitoring, selective attention, inferring and anxiety–reducing etc. Third, they should accommodate individual differences in strategy instruction. In the course of strategy instruction, teachers should be aimed at providing help to the great majority while not boring for the more advanced students and not discouraging those with low ability.This research has both theoretical and practical significance. It has enriched the theoretical studies on the listening strategies used by senior high school students, and further confirmed listening strategies have substantive relations with listening comprehension achievement. It has also offered practical guidance to the teaching of listening in high school.