Relieving Non-English Majors’ English Listening Anxiety Through Listening Strategy Training

A successful English learner is expected to comprehend five basic skills, listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. Among these five basic skills, listening is considered crucial in communication. Only by fully understanding what others attempt to express in their speaking, can the learners give an appropriate feedback. For the non-English majors, listening is much more difficult for those who are weak in English. Thus, how to develop learners’English listening ability is always of great concern by English teachers and researchers. Listening comprehension has been investigated by some foreign language teachers and researchers from different angles, in which listening anxiety and listening strategy training has attracted extensive attention from scholars at home and abroad, and has achieved fruitful results. However, the research on how to apply listening strategies to the process of foreign language teaching and the effect of listening strategy training towards listening anxiety is relatively rare. The purpose of this research is to explore whether it is useful to alleviate learners’ listening anxiety level and enhance learners’listening proficiency through listening strategy training.The subjects in the research consist of83freshmen majoring in Finance in Beijing City University. The author appoints Class2of40students to the experimental group, the other class of43students to the control group. The author investigates the participants’listening anxiety level, listening proficiency and the frequency of listening strategy use through tests, observation, questionnaires. Then the author implements a semester’s listening strategy training in the experimental group, while the control group receives no special listening strategy training, and they were taught in the traditional way. At the end of the semester, students from both the experimental group and the control group take a post-test. The results of the post-test and listening anxiety questionnaire show the significant differences between the control group and the experimental group in the average scores of listening anxiety, listening strategy use and listening proficiency which confirm the effectiveness of listening strategy training on reducing listening anxiety and improving listening proficiency.The findings of the research seem to confirm the necessity of listening strategy training which could effectively reduce students’listening anxiety level and improve their listening proficiency from empirical perspective. Pedagogical speaking, this study offers some insights into how to apply the listening strategy training to the process of teaching, helping learners reduce listening anxiety so as to improve their listening proficiency in foreign language learning.