A Study Of Listening Strategiesadopted By Senior High School Students

At present, more and more attention is paid to listening comprehension by both students and teachers. However, how to conduct effective listening training in classroom bothers teachers, many of whom just play the recorder, let the students do listening test papers, and then check the answers. During this process, teachers are not clear about their role in listening teaching, and students gradually lose interest in such listening training.English Course Criteria made by the National Education Commission in 2001 sets a clear demand on listening teaching, pointing out that helping students master study strategies is a task of English course. Research shows listening strategy is one of the most important factors which affect the process of listening comprehension. Strategy training can motivate students'interest, and improve their listening comprehension.The thesis first points out the significance of the study, identifying the purpose of the writing in the current listening teaching situation in senior high school. Then it introduces the theoretical background: definitions of learning strategies and listening strategies; categories of listening strategies; research on listening strategies and their effects on listening proficiency; research on the effectiveness of listening strategy training. In this thesis, the author adopts listening test, questionnaire and interview to find out: (1) What are the listening strategies adopted by students in senior high school? (2) Are there differences in the use of listening strategies between high achievers and low achievers? If yes, what are they? The subjects of the questionnaire are 59 (valid) grade two students from Class 1 and 52 (valid) grade two students from Class 9 in Suzhou No.1 Senior High School. The data collected from the research is processed by SPSS 11.5. The results show: (1) Students in Suzhou No.1 Senior High School use five types of listening strategies: meaning-focused strategies, mother-tongue strategies, form-focused strategies, meta-cognitive strategies and social-affective strategies. (2) The difference between high achievers and low achievers lies in the employment of monitoring strategies, word strategies and grammar strategies.Finally, based on the findings of the research, the author points out that the training of some important strategies should be emphasized in listening teaching, such as listening selectively to detect important details, self-monitoring strategies, predicting and making inferences, lowering anxiety, being self-encouraging, cooperating with others and empathizing with others. Also, the author sums up some pedagogical implications from the research of listening strategies adopted by senior high school students: to organize strategy training in proper sequence; to create enough opportunities for the students to practice key strategies; to provoke students'interest in practicing listening comprehension; to build their confidence in improving listening comprehension, and to put strategy training into real listening class.