An Empirical Study Of High School English Listening Strategy Training

Among the four basic skills of foreign language learning,listening is of great significance.For such a long time,teachers,in English teaching classes,pay more attention to vocabulary and grammar of an article and focus on reading or writing exercise,but they ignore the listening in English teaching.However,in foreign language learning,listening is actually the first step.If the input of listening and reading is not enough,it's hard to get the perfect output of speaking and writing.Listening comprehension requires students to deal with multilevel spoken information,which means it belongs to one of the difficult parts of English teaching.At the present time,there are still some problems in teaching listening,such as processing listening material by following a certain traditional mode and ignoring the instruction of listening strategies.These boring listening lessons result in students losing motivation.Despite the great effort of teachers and students,students' ability of listening comprehension is still hard to improve.With the rapid development of studies on learning strategies,researchers began to study the effect of listening strategies in English listening class and found these strategies have a positive effect on listening comprehension.However,the existing researches mainly chose adult language learners as objects of study,which means they ignore the English listening strategies instruction in high schools.On the other hand,in these researches,some only have one single target strategy and some cover all of the listening strategies.Instead,this study chooses high school students as the objects of study,lasts for about half a year and adopts the methods of investigation,experiment and interview to figure out the following questions:1.What is the influence of English listening strategies instruction on high school students' strategy awareness and strategy using situation?2.What is the effect of English listening strategies instruction on high school students' listening comprehension?During the research process,the study makes a reference to previous research findings,based on Monitor Theory and Information Processing Model to study the influence of listening strategies instruction.The study invites students in a Senior HighSchool in Anhui province to participate in,and uses a questionnaire to investigate their strategy using situation in English listening.According to the investigation and then dividing the participants into an experiment group and a control group,the study conducts the listening strategies instruction in the experiment group with “Six Steps of Strategies Instruction Model”: to learn about students,to determine the strategies to be trained,to design instruction plan,to conduct the plan,to evaluate the effect of instruction and to adjust the instruction program.Moreover,by means of case study,the paper analyzes the process of listening strategies instruction,including note-taking,generalization,reasoning,and self-evaluation and anxiety release.In the end,the result of students' interviews and the data analysis show the following conclusions:1.The listening strategies instruction did improve strategy awareness and the situation of listening strategies using.2.Through listening strategies instruction,students got higher listening scores and the ability of listening comprehension was improved.The study makes up for the shortness of listening strategies instruction in high school English classes,providing a practical example to educators and researchers of this research field.This English listening strategies instruction study in high school confirmed the positive influence on high school students' English learning.It contributes to improving students' strategy awareness and building their strategy system to expand their choices of strategies,therefore,to develop their ability of self-learning.Meanwhile,teachers can be aware of the great role of strategies instruction and emphasize the learning of strategies in English class to develop students' core literacy in English subjects.