A Case Study On English Listening Strategies Use Of Grade Nine Students In Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture

As Nunan (1999) pointed out,"Listening is the basic skill in language learning. Without the listening skill, learners will never learn to communicate effectively." But due to the complexity of listening and temporariness of utterance, students’ listening performance isn’t very satisfactory. From the1980s, researchers had been probing into listening strategies. However, the participants in previous researches, regardless of at home or abroad, are mainly adults and college students. Little research has been done on Grade Nine students in ethnic areas.By means of a questionnaire, which was designed by the author on the basis of learning strategies listed by O’Malley&Chamot (1990) and some of Bacon’s (1992) listening strategies as well, this research investigated listening strategies used by Grade Nine students, explored the relationship between listening strategies and listening performance, distinguished the strategies used by upper group and lower group students and discusses the gender differences in listening strategies use. The participants were128Grade Nine students from No.1Middle School in Longshan County of Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Nationality Autonomous Prefecture, Hunan province.All data collected were analyzed by SPSS (Statistic Package for Social Science) version17.0and the results were as follows:(1) Grade Nine students employ listening strategies at a medium frequency level;(2) of the three major categories, cognitive strategies are most correlated to listening performance;(3) there are significant differences between high performance and low performance listeners in the use of these three major categories;(4) even though there is no statistical difference between boys and girls in using the three major categories, girls employ listening strategies more frequently than boys;(5) social/affective strategies are employed more frequently than cognitive strategies by students in ethnic areas, especially by left-behind students.On the basis of the findings, some tentative suggestions are put forward in terms of processes of pre-listening, while listening and post listening.