A Correlative Research On English Listening Beliefs And Strategies Of Middle School Students

Since the 1970 s,researchers' attention has shifted from teaching to learning.Great interest has been focused on studying how individual differences affected language achievement and the correlation between individual difference variables.To date,there has been a lot of research which particularly investigated the relationship between language learning beliefs and strategies,with positive evidence that learner beliefs are significantly related to strategy use.However,little research has explored the relationship between the two variables from the perspective of English listening.So this thesis intends to investigate the relationship between language learning beliefs and strategies in terms of listening comprehension.Three research questions are explored: 1)What beliefs do senior middle school students hold about EFL listening? 2)What learning strategies do senior middle school students use for listening comprehension? 3)What is the relationship between students' learning beliefs and strategies in terms of listening comprehension? Through this study,the author hopes to bring about some insightful information on research in this area and provide some implications for English listening teaching,learning strategy training and students' listening study.A combination of quantitative and qualitative method is adopted in this study.A questionnaire is used to investigate 100 first-grade high school students in Fujian Province,and 6 students are randomly selected for interviews based on their listening scores.The results demonstrate that there exists significant and positive correlation between learners' beliefs and use of strategies for listening comprehension.Students with more positive and stronger learning beliefs are likely to use strategies more frequently.Also,there are positive correlations between each category of beliefs and strategies.Learner beliefs have great influence on learners' use of strategies,and likewise,use of strategies may reflect learner beliefs.In addition,high school students in this study are reported to hold various beliefs,and most of them hold positive beliefs about English listening.Students also report a variety of strategy use for listening comprehension,but the frequency of the overall strategy use is at the medium level.Cognitive strategies are more frequently used by most students,followed by socio-affective and metacognitive strategies.Through this research,teachers are supposed to help students foster positive beliefs that lead to effective use of learning strategies.Hopefully,learners are also expected to know what beliefs they generally hold,what strategies they use most or least and what other different strategies they can employ in listening comprehension.Due to limited time and energy,it is a pity that this research only investigated 100 first-year students from a high school in Fujian,and listening scores were not used as a variable to explore its correlations with learning beliefs and strategies.So further research in this area needs to be conducted in the future and a larger sample needs to be taken into consideration.