Effects Of Listening Strategy Instruction On News Audiotext Comprehension

The present study reports on the effects of listening strategy instruction onnon-English majors’ English news comprehension ability. The aim of the study is toprovide statistical evidence for news listening strategy instruction and some teachingimplications for college non-English majors’ news listening strategy instruction.The participants in this study are81non-English majors from different apartments ofHuazhong University of Science and Technology. An experimental group of41participants received5hours of VOA Special English news listening strategy instructionover10weeks while a comparison group of40participants didn’t. Pre-andpost-instruction questionnaires by the experimental group were conducted and analysedto demonstrate whether the listening strategy instruction can develop students’employment of top-down listening strategies in news comprehension. In addition, thepre-and post-news listening tests were administered to see whether the listening strategyinstruction can improve the students’ news listening comprehension. Independent anddependent T-test in SPSS17.0was used to analyze the data.The findings of the research indicate that the most difficult three obstacles that thenon-English majors face in English news comprehension are their lack of vocabulary andidioms, high speech rate and intonation and too much attention on certain unfamiliarwords. The comparison of scores achieved by experimental group and comparison groupin both pre-and post-test revealed that the students in the experimental group gainedhigher scores than the comparison group in the post-test, which means the listeningstrategy instruction had a positive effect on the experimental group’s newscomprehension. In addition, the post-instruction questionnaires done by the experimentalgroup showed that more than half of the students had been aware of the top-down listening strategies and started using the strategies while listening.Based on the above findings, this thesis points out that in news listening strategyinstruction for non-English majors in China, teachers should expand the students’ newsvocabulary, familiarize students with the discourse feature of news reports, raise students’awareness of employing listening strategies, pay more attention to key strategies andconduct the strategy instruction in an appropriate pedagogical cycle.