To Improve The EFL Rural Beginners' Listening Ability With Selective Attention Learning Strategy

Listening comprehension has been a hot point in foreign language teaching. In recent years, the studies on the learning strategies are prosperous. There are a lot of papers focusing on learning strategy training in the listening field. While among them there are only a few papers focusing on the EFL rural beginners.At present, the listening instruction in the rural junior middle schools is still teacher-centered, which emphasizes on providing plenty of comprehensible input and mechanical listening exercises to the beginners. The learners feel that it is hard to improve their listening comprehension ability. There is a common phenomenon that the EFL rural beginners pay attention to every word, every phrase and every sentence in listening comprehension process, but they cannot grasp the main idea of the listening material because of their limited attention. Thus, they fail in listening comprehension time and again.In order to help the beginners pay special attention to the important information based on the listening tasks and also to improve the effectiveness in their listening comprehension, the researcher conducted a 12-week selective attention learning strategy training to the 61 EFL rural beginners in the Shazi Junior Middle School (in Yanhe County, Tongren District, Guizhou Province, PRC).The researcher adopted the qualitative and quantitative methods in the present study. The instruments in this study included learners' retrospective record on listening comprehension, listening checklist, questionnaires, and tests. The research consisted of two parts, that is, the pilot study and the main study. The former was conducted to measure the validity and the reliability of the instruments. The latter was conducted to testify whether or not the learning strategy training can improve the EFL rural learners' listening proficiency.Firstly, the researcher did relevant literature review and proposed research questions. Secondly, the EFL Learners' Listening Survey and the pretest were administered to the subjects. The result shows that there were seven major difficulties met by the EFL rural learners in listening comprehension. The most difficult one was that they could not concentrate attention and could not remember information.According to their pretest score, the subjects were divided into two groups. The independent samples t-test showed that the two groups had no significant difference in listening proficiency.Then, the researcher treated the subjects in two different conditions. To the control group, the researcher did listening instruction in the traditional way. On the contrary, to the experiment group, the researcher conducted systematic selective attention learning strategy training based on the Chamot's 3P2E Strategy Training Model. After training, the strategy awareness in the experiment group was strengthened.Lastly, the posttest and the Young Learners Strategy Use Survey were administered.The independent samples t-test and the paired samples t-test analysis showed that the listening ability of the experiment group was greatly improved. The result of the questionnaire showed that the frequency of strategy use in the experiment group was higher than that in the control group. The correlation analysis showed that the selective attention learning strategy use correlated with the listening achievement. Thus it showed that the selective attention learning strategy training could improve the EFL rural beginners' listening ability.The implementation of this study is that the English teachers should not only provide comprehensible input and enough mechanical listening exercises for the beginners, but also imbed learning strategy training into the classroom instruction in order to enhance the learners' effectiveness in language learning.