An Experimental Study Of Cognitive Strategy Training In English Listening Comprehension

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four basic skills that a foreign language learner should master. Among the four skills, listening comprehension is so important that it ranks first. Meanwhile, in the past few decades learning strategy has became one of the hottest topics in the field of language learning and teaching. While early studies on learning strategies were more exploratory in nature, later researchers become more theory-based and more scientific. With the further research on language learning strategies, the effect of cognitive strategies in language studying is affirmed and the potential application to cognitive strategy is known, too. Therefore, the role played by cognitive strategies in English listening teaching cannot be overlooked.In order to cultivate students'cognitive ability better, the author of this thesis attempts to make a study of how to cultivate the students'cognitive strategies in English language teaching by taking learners at a university as subjects. The study was conducted on 65 non-English major freshmen during one semester and the purpose of the experiment is to enhance the students'awareness of strategy usage thereby to improve the students'listening ability. The study, with a training package of cognitive strategies training and listening comprehension through an intensified practice of both guided and free listening, intends to answer four research questions:1) Which cognitive strategies do Chinese college non-English majors frequently use in English listening comprehension?2) Can cognitive strategies training improve Chinese non-English major students'listening ability?3) Do the students at high, medium, low proficiency level differ in their use of cognitive strategies in English listening comprehension?To achieve a convincing result, Means, standard deviations and independent-samples t-tests are used in this investigation. The experiment has demonstrated that cultivating the students'cognitive strategies can narrow the gap between the high and low groups, and then improve the listening ability. The results are presented as follows:1) In English listening comprehension, Chinese college non-English majors in general employ a variety of learning strategies at a medium frequency level.2) Through one semester strategy training, as shown from the pre-test and post-test results of the two groups, we found that after experiment the gap between students at low, medium, and high level experimental group has narrowed clearly, that is to say, the experimental group's listening ability has greatly improved.3) As far as high level students and low level students are concerned, they are significantly different in the use of learning strategies. The differences are statistically significant between high and low level listeners on the use of cognitive strategies.The findings of this study suggest that learning strategy training has a facilitative effect on Chinese non-English major undergraduate students; therefore, it is believed from the study that listening learning strategies should be taught and learned.