A Study Of The Correlation Between Depressive Tendency And English Listening Strategies Of The Senior High School Students

Affective factors have increasingly aroused interest of many researchers in recent years.Anxiety,one of the most vital affective factors,has been playing an important role in foreign language learning.Varieties of previous studies investigating the relationship between anxiety and listening strategies have found that there is significant negative correlation between them.Depressive tendency,another affective factor,has been studied by many psychologists who certify that depressive tendency is commonly existent and prevailing among adolescents and has negative impact on the students’ memory and attention.Memory impairment and concentration difficulty are common symptoms of depressive tendency and they do harm to language learning.It particular affects listening which requires immediate response and intense attention.However,depressive tendency is neglected by foreign language scholars because it has been regarded as a scope in psychological field.Findings from the studies of learning strategies manifest that the students can be trained to make effective use of learning strategies to become more efficient and autonomous language learners.The study of listening strategies is also gained an increasing concern.Compared with the rich literature in the correlation between anxiety and listening strategies,very few research has been conducted on the relationship between depressive tendency and listening strategies.This dissertation attempts to conduct an empirical study of depressive tendency and listening strategies of senior high school students and probe into alleviating the extent of depressive tendency.The author hopes the findings can provide reference for the relevant research with authentic and reliable data.This study aims at answering the following questions:(1)What is the overall state of depressive tendency experienced by the senior high school students?(2)What are the characteristics and distributions of listening strategies used by the senior high school students?(3)Is there any correlation existed among senior high school students’ depressive tendency,listening strategies use and listening level? If yes,how are they correlated with one another?This study adopts the quantitative research methodology with some qualitative data as supplemented.The quantitative data gives priority to the state of depressive tendency,the distribution of listening strategies and the relationship between depressive tendency,English listening strategies and English listening proficiency and the qualitative data further explores the potential causes of depressive tendency and the effect of depressive tendency on listening strategies.The participants in the present study are 180 senior high school students of Grade Three,chosen from four classes of Yangguang High School,Guizhou Province.The research instruments include three questionnaires of the participants,the Background Information Questionnaire(BIQ),the English Listening Comprehension Strategies(ELCS),and the Self-rating Depression Scale(SDS).The quantitative data were analyzed by SPSS 19.0(Statistic Package of Social Sciences)for Windows.Reliability analysis,descriptive statistics,Pearson correlation analysis,and Independent-samples T-test analysis were adopted in the study.The major findings from this empirical study are as follows:(1)Most of the senior high school students in Yangguang High School experience depressive tendency.The low depressive tendency group takes up 33.1%,21.1% of participants are in the level of medium depressive tendency,and then high depressive tendency group accounts for 8.6%.(2)The senior high school students tend to use social/affective strategies most frequently,followed by cognitive strategies,and they seldom employ metacognitive strategies.(3)There is significantly negative correlation among depressive tendency,use of listening strategies and listening level;depressive tendency has the strongest negative correlation with metacognitive strategies,followed by social/ affective strategies.The least significantly negative correlation is found between depressive tendency and cognitive strategies.Besides,the result indicates that the more listening strategies the students use,the higher their listening proficiency will be and they will make more excellent achievement in listening.The results of the study prove that students can enhance their frequency of using listening strategies,improve their listening level and achievement by reducing the extent of depressive tendency.The teachers can use certain methods to help students reduce depressive tendency and train students to employ effective listening strategies.The present study has some pedagogical implications to English teachers.