A Study On Effectiveness Of Strategies-Based Instruction In English Listening Teaching In Senior High Schools

With the development of society and economy, more and more people pay their attention to communicative skills. Listening plays a crucial role in improving people's communicative competence in daily communication. Among the four major language skills, listening is the most basic and foremost in second language acquisition. Listening is the base of study as well as the resource of learning. Lacking effective and appropriate learning strategies, as well as the characteristics of listening, makes many students regard listening as the most difficult part. According to National Research Center's survey for Foreign Language Education on the current states of English teachers, almost 25.9% teachers think that"lacking good learning methods"is the main reason of students'poor listening, speaking and low efficiency in learning. Therefore, trainings on the learning strategies are urgently necessary for both teachers and students which help students to promote their learning efficiency.Since the 1970s, many researchers at home and abroad have done some researches on learning strategies and listening strategies. They notice that the effective use of English learning strategy can greatly improve learners'learning ability and their performance, so more and more researchers begin to pay attention to the cultivation of learners'language learning strategies. Weaver & Cohen (1994) proposed an overall teaching model for the strategies trainings---strategies-based instruction. Strategies-based instruction is a kind of learner-centered teaching instruction which is explicitly and implicitly embedded into the teaching materials to guarantee that learners will become successful autonomous learners when they are asked to learn the language by themselves. The overall objective of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of strategies-based instruction in listening teaching.In the study, the author chose two natural classes in senior high school in a city of Heilongjiang province as subjects of the study and did a longitudinal study. Both the two classes were taught by the same English teacher, but the teacher adopted different teaching methods. Class A (Experimental Class) was trained to use strategies-based instruction in listening class, Class B (Comparison Class) was taught by traditional teaching methods in listening class. The author observed the classes for 4 months, and later a post test was given to these two classes. The results show that students from the experimental class average score gain a higher than those from the comparison class. The comparison shows that strategies-based instruction has some effects in improving the efficiency of listening teaching.