The Effects Of Self-assessment On Non-english Major Students’ Listening

Listening, as one of the four basic skills of second language acquisition, is crucial tothe language learning. In the early stage, listening teaching relied mainly on the teacher’sinstruction. With the development of cognitive psychology, people discover that “how tolearn” is more important than “how to teach”, that is to say, autonomous learning plays avital role in listening learning. Self-assessment is the important part of autonomouslearning, and also the important one in metacognitive strategy. Through taking part in thejudgment, assessment and monitoring of the learning process, learners were guided intoself-inspiring, self-adjustment and self-learning. This research topic stirred the curiosityand interest of the researcher to conduct this study, but there are not plenty of studies athome and abroad about the effect of self-assessment on listening performance, even rareabout self-assessment applying after class.In order to make clear whether there are positive influences of self-assessment tolistening learning, the researcher made a study among89non-English major students inTianjin Normal University in18weeks. The instruments in this research are listeningstrategy use questionnaire, listening affects questionnaire and listening learning autonomyquestionnaire; pre and post listening proficiency test; the statistics analysis software,SPSS16.0. The researcher used quantitative and qualitative methods to do data analysis.The results show that, firstly, self-assessment has a strong influence on listeningmetacognitive strategies use; secondly, self-assessment may maintain learners’ listeninginstinctive motivation and attitude and release their anxiety and improve their confidencesignificantly; thirdly, self-assessment can improve the autonomy of listening learning;fourthly, because of the improvement of listeners’ listening strategy use, listening affectsand autonomy of listening learning, their listening proficiency have also been improvedconsiderably.This study gave some implications. Initially, much more attention on learners’ autonomous learning ability and their comprehensive development should be paid.Secondly, self-assessment, as a kind of learning strategies, could be used to improve theefficiency of listening learning. Thirdly, self-assessment enables students to monitor andcontrol the process of listening learning which will be helpful to improve their learningachievement. Fourthly, self-assessment stimulates the students’ instinctive motivation oflistening learning. Last but not least, self-assessment modifies the roles of teachers andstudents in classroom context and builds a communicative bridge between them. In the end,the author points out some limitations for this research and proposes some suggestions forfurther studies in this domain.