| With the acceleration of globalization,China’s international communication has been increasingly frequent,and the pivotal role of English as a communication tool is prominent.Meanwhile,"listening",as the main way to obtain information in daily communication,is the most common form of language input.Therefore,the significance of English listening teaching is self-evident.Nonetheless,listening comprehension is a fragile and complex dynamic cognitive process(Field,J.,1998),which puts forward certain requirements for students’ contextual knowledge and information decoding skill.On the one hand,in the conventional listening class,teachers put much stress on listening practice but fail to instruct students in some effective listening methods(Zhang,2018).On the other hand,students do not form sound listening strategy awareness,and they are liable to show a poor performance in the listening due to the existence of listening anxiety as well as their inability in information processing.In order to ameliorate the stated issues,listening strategy instruction(LSI)is applied into English listening class of junior high school.In the present study,under the guidance of information processing theory,the teacher selects prediction strategy,selective attention strategy,note-taking strategy and self-evaluation strategy as instruction content.Then the teacher integrates LSI into daily listening teaching in a targeted and planned way based on the existing listening materials,in which students have a chance to learn "how to listen" through specific listening practice.This study is strived to investigate the effect of LSI on junior high school students’ English listening comprehension and listening anxiety.Therefore,this experiment applies LSI into junior high school listening class in comparison with the conventional listening instruction.This study undertook a pretest-posttest comparison group quasi-experimental design.The two intact classes were selected from a junior high school located in Guangdong Province.The two classes were randomly divided into experimental class and control class,with a total of 91 participants,including 45 boys and 46 girls,with an average age of 14.From March 2019 to July 2019,this study carried out a 14-week teaching experiment,in which the experimental class was conducted with LSI while the control class was still implemented with the conventional listening instruction mode.Before and after the experiment,two classes were carried out listening comprehension pretest-posttest and listening anxiety survey.After the data collection,the author utilized Paired Samples t-Test as well as Independent Samples t-Test to examine the significant difference with SPSS 26.0.Then semi-structured interview was administered in the experimental class,and the interview content was transcribed and analyzed by the author,so as to further explore the reasons for the effects of LSI on students’ listening comprehension and listening anxiety.After the author analyzing the research results,some findings were concluded as following:1.Listening strategy instruction significantly enhanced students’ English listening comprehension performance.Before and after the experiment,the mean score of English listening test results in EC increased from 18.022 to 19.000(t=-2.697,p=.007<.05).2.Listening strategy instruction significantly alleviated students’ English listening anxiety degree,especially their anxiety in lack of self-confidence and in lack of listening skills.Before and after the experiment,among the results of four dimensions of listening anxiety in experimental class,the mean value of "the lack of self-confidence" factor decreased from 3.0326 to 2.6630(t=2.507,p=.016<.05),and the mean value of "the lack of listening skills" factor decreased from 2.7826 to 2.4511(t=2.219,p=.032<.05).3.In addition,based on the problems appeared in the implementation of the LSI,some feasible suggestions were provided by students,such as teachers are supposed to provide students authentic listening materials and diverse listening practice,arrange reasonable consolidation practice and adjust self-evaluation forms regularly,etc. |
