On The Note-taking Strategy Of Students In English Listening Classes In Rural Senior High Schools

Listening is an important part of English teaching in senior middle schools. Since 2001, when listening was appointed as an important part of the national entrance examination, it has been paid wide attention. Though students who under the teachers'direction have spent a large amount of time and energy to practice listening comprehension, their listening proficiency, however, neither satisfies the teachers nor themselves. In this situation, researches on how to improve the efficiency of listening teaching have drawn much attention. Implementing note-taking strategy training in listening classes is one of the ways, though its effectiveness is still under discussion. This thesis attempts to verify the effectiveness of note-taking strategy training through anempirical study in listening classrooms of rural senior high schools, and begins with a general literature review on listening strategies, the relevant studies of note-taking, the cognitive theory, the cognitive strategies and the metacognitive strategies. The author concludes a five-step training program on the basis of the strategy training models proposed by linguistic experts (Oxford, 1990; O'Malley & Chamot, 1990; Wen Qiufang, 2004), following is the five main steps:(1) Determine students'major difficulties in ELC(2) Make a plan for note-taking strategy training(3) Conduct strategy training(4) Evaluate strategy training(5) Revise strategy trainingUnder the direction of this training program, the author used qualitative and quantitative methods conduct the 18 weeks'note-taking strategy training with 184 students from four classes of Xiong Yue No.2 Senior High School randomly chosen as the subjects. The pre-tests showed that there was no significant difference in listening proficiency among these four classes. The experiment group was made up of 46 students, and the rest 138 students made up three control groups. The experimental group had the note-taking strategy training, at the same time, the control groups were also taught in the traditional way—play the tape and check the answers. All the groups took pre-test, mid-test and post-test, and all were surveyed on the difficulties they encountered in the listening activities. Based on the scores of the subjects in the pre-tests, 10 high score achievers (considered as high-proficiency listeners) and 10 low score achievers (considered as low-proficiency listeners) were identified in the experimental group.The author found that the new words in listening passages, failing to catch the meaning of the whole sentence, forgetting what heard too quickly, missing the coming information are the main difficulties that students encounter in listening activities after analyzed the result of the tests.With the help of SPSS, the author analyzed the results from three examinations, an interview and four questionnaires, the conclusions are in the following:(1) In the post-test, the experimental group performed much better than that of the control groups, which proves that the note-taking strategy training is effective in promoting students'listening proficiency.(2) In the post-tests, low proficiency listeners make much greater progress than high proficiency listeners in listening comprehension, which proves that note-taking strategy training has a greater positive effect on low proficiency listeners in improving listening proficiency than high proficiency listeners.The study affords useful guidance on note-taking strategy training on English listening comprehension and points some practical suggestions for English listening teaching, which is beneficial for both teachers and students.Considered as the limitations of individual differences and the influence from other listening strategies, much is need to be improved in this study, and more accurate result is hoped in the further research.