A Study On The Relationship Among Listening Strategies,Listening Anxiety And Listening Achievements Of English Majors At An Independent College

As a way of getting language input,listening occupies an important position in foreign language learning and daily communicative interactions.As traditional grammar-translation teaching prevails for quite a long time,most language learners focus much of their attention on the linguistic knowledge,such as the lexicon and syntactic;whereas they often ignore the communicative aspect of the target language,such as listening and speaking.Besides,listening comprehension is characterized by its complexity and instantaneity,making it rather difficult for the learners to master.However,in the middle of the 1970s,the focus of foreign language researches shifted from studying 'how teachers teach' to exploring 'how students learn'.Following this trend,researchers have extended their studies to the domain of the effect of learner factors,such as learning strategies and affective factors,on language learning.As a sub-skill of leaning strategies,listening strategies concerns certain measures learners take to make their listening more effective.While anxiety is commonly regarded as an affective factor which might exert adverse effect on language learning.Most previous studies are concerned with the general foreign language anxiety,while few anxiety-related studies on specific language skills,such as listening,can be found.Therefore,the present study takes listening anxiety and listening strategies as the variables and tries to explore the listening strategies use,listening anxiety state as well as the relationship between these two variables and listening achievements among the English-majors from an independent college.And the research questions lie in the following aspects:(1)What is the status quo of EFL listening strategies and listening anxiety of English-major students?(2)What is the relationship between listening strategies and listening achievements?(3)What is the relationship between listening anxiety and listening achievements?(4)What is the relationship between listening strategies and listening anxiety?(5)What is the relationship among listening strategies,listening anxiety and listening achievements?And the present study takes English majors of two natural classes from Zhi Xing College of Hubei University as the subjects,and collects the statistical data through questionnaires,English listening achievements test and interviews.And the research results are as follows:(1)The subjects investigated employ the overall listening strategies at a median frequency level,among which meaning-focused strategies,social/affective strategies and metacognitive strategies are the most frequently used;besides,the high achievements listeners generally use listening strategies more frequently than the ineffective ones;and there exists significant difference in the use of the overall listening strategies,as well as monitoring,grammar strategies,association and predicting between the two different listening achievements groups.And the majority of these participants falls into the medium and high anxiety groups,the advanced listeners experience a lower level of anxiety than the low achievements listeners.(2)Listening strategies are positively correlated with listening achievements to a significant degree,and metacognitive strategies,meaning-focused strategies and social/affective strategies reveal comparatively strong and marked correlation with listening achievements.(3)Listening anxiety is negatively correlated with listening achievements to a significant degree.(4)The correlation analyses also reveal a markedly negative relation between the overall listening strategies and listening anxiety,and the social/affective strategies reveal the strongest significant negative correlation with listening anxiety,followed by the meaning-focused strategies and metacognitive strategies;however,mother-tongue-reliance strategies is the only one which is positively correlated with listening anxiety but at insignificant level;in addition,the low-anxiety group generally employs listening strategies more often than the high-anxiety one except the mother-tongue-reliance strategies,and the low-anxiety group is distinguished significantly from the high-anxiety group in each subdivided listening strategies with the exception of mother-tongue-reliance strategies.(5)Path analysis indicates that the predicting power of listening strategies on listening anxiety is significant,which is negative;and so is the predicting power of listening anxiety on listening achievements;but listening strategies reveals no significant relation with listening achievements;moreover,the path diagram further reveals that listening strategies can exert its indirect significant influence on listening achievements via listening anxiety.In spite of several limitations of this study,this research still makes a tentative conclusion about the relationship among listening strategies,listening anxiety and listening achievements,which might arouse the attention of foreign language scholars and teacher on these two variables as well as provide some theoretical bases for their listening teaching practice aimed to enforce the employment of listening strategies and reduce the level of listening anxiety.