The Empirical Research Of Meta-cognitive And Cognitive Strategy Training In Compound Dictation

Since the revision of college English syllabus requirements in2007, the percentage of listening part increased to35%, and compound dictation, as an indispensable test item in listening part, has been used in CET4and CET6from then on. In comparison with other test items, compound dictation is generally recognized as a testing measure which emphasizes on testing learners’integrated language competence. So it requests that the students should not only have good listening skills but also be good at spelling, note-taking and writing expression. However, according to the statistical analysis of the results from the previous CET4, it is found that most students got much lower scores in compound dictation, which showed students’poor ability of listening comprehension and even aroused teachers’attention to reflect on classroom teaching at college.Then, how to effectively improve students’listening comprehension and integrated language competence? A large number of researches in China and many western countries have been conducted to propose that strategy training could possibly enhance language achievements and strengthen learning motivation and learning autonomy, which ought to be involved in regular course contents. Furthermore, there were also lots of researches aiming at listening teaching and the results showed that strategy training was helpful for developing listening comprehension. In those researches, most of them have paid attention to meta-cognitive or cognitive strategy training alone. Besides, questionnaires as one kind of research methods were used more frequently than the experimental research or case study which would probably provide more forceful findings.Given the limitations of the above researches, this study will take questionnaires, interview and the experiment as research measures. It begins with investigating the second-year non English majors at college about their difficulties in compound dictation, and then selects useful listening strategies to implement the strategy training. Based on the results, it will discuss the effect of meta-cognitive and cognitive strategy training on the improvement of compound dictation’s achievement, and moreover it is going to explore whether strategy training could affect strategy use. The brief procedures of this research contain:1) to choose the research subjects; there are80non-English major sophomores from two classes (one class is the experimental group including40students; the other is the control group including40students);2) to conduct pretest, post-test, questionnaire and strategy training in the experimental group; Meanwhile, the control group will receive the regular courses without any strategy training, and they are also requested to finish pretest and posttest. All the data collected from this research will be processed by SPSS (Version13.0).The results showed that:1) after receiving the three months strategy training, the subjects in the experimental group made significant improvement on the meta-cognitive while not on the cognitive strategy use in the compound dictation;2) The experimental group made some progress in fulfilling the sentences with the help of strategy training, but without significant improvement;3) The strategy training played a significant role in promoting the overall achievement of compound dictation as well as the achievement in the lexical blanks.