Applying Listening Strategies To English Teaching In Vocational High School In China

The present study discusses the role of listening strategy instruction for vocational high school students in China by investigating the effect of listening strategy training, the rates of acquisition of four listening strategies, and the training effects on two tasks (i.e., identification and making response).Two classes of first-year vocational high school students participated in the study as the experimental and control groups. Two listening tests were taken as the pre-test and the post-test. Before the training, the pre-test was administered to the two groups. Then, the experimental group received specific listening strategy instructions for about nine months, whereas the control group listened to the same materials and completed the same exercises without any strategy training. After the training, a post-test was given to both groups at the same time. In addition, the experimental group had to complete a questionnaire.The overall results show that the listening strategy training facilitated vocational high school students' listening comprehension in that the experimental group made significant after the training and the majority of students in the experimental group reported that they felt the training pleasant and useful. Moreover, they benefit most from scanning during the training, followed by linguistic inferencing, and most of the subjects considered the training of scanning, skimming, and linguistic inferencing useful, but not that of note-taking. With respect to the training effects on tasks,identification was found to be an easier task and the subjects benefited more from the strategy training than making responses. Also, they felt less troubled with identification.The present findings suggest that the explicit strategy instruction help enhance students' listening skills and their listening processes should be emphasized more than their test scores. Moreover, it is said that teachers' belief will influences students' learning attitude. Further research may include a larger number of subjects, and the listening tests with a variety of tasks may be chosen to further explore students' listening strategy uses. Finally, more listening strategies may be taught to see if the training effects will remain more evident.