An Empirical Study On English Listening Strategies Instruction In Junior High School

As one of the four basic language skills,listening is an essential part of language learning and teaching.The National English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education and the Senior High School Entrance Examination have not only attached great importance to students’ listening comprehension ability but also emphasized the necessity of strategy instruction in teaching listening.However,current listening strategy instruction offers limited guidance and practice,which provides room for further investigation of listening strategy instruction.Based on this reality,it is necessary to design effective listening strategy instruction and explore its effect on students’ listening strategy use and their listening comprehension.Based on the theories of Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational and Depth of Processing,this study extracted ten important listening strategies according to the analysis of the requirements of listening comprehension ability for junior high school students in National English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education and listening tests of Chongqing Senior High School Entrance Examination,and adapted Chamot and O’Malley’s Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach as the framework to teach each listening strategy,aiming to promote students’ listening strategy use and enhance their listening comprehension ability.This study attempts to answer two questions:(1)What is the effect of listening strategy instruction on the students’ general listening strategy use?(2)What is the effect of listening strategy instruction on the students’ listening comprehension? Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed to conduct a comparative teaching experiment for about one semester in two parallel classes in a junior high school in Chongqing.Since students’ listening strategy use is procedural knowledge,listening strategy instruction in EC taught students what a listening strategy is,why and how to use it,which could develop students’ declarative and procedural knowledge of listening strategies.Finally,based on the data collected from questionnaires,tests,classroom observation,and interviews,the changes of the two classes before and after the experiment were analyzed and discussed to examine the effectiveness of listening strategy instruction.The findings are as follows:(1)Students’ listening strategy use can be improved significantly by strategy-oriented English listening teaching in junior high school,which improves not just the frequency but also the quality of their listening strategy use,and helps change students’ attitudes toward listening strategies.After the instruction,students’ use frequency of listening strategy changed from an intermediate level to a high level,indicating that students’ listening strategies use became proceduralized and they were able to use the strategies automatically.Listening strategy instruction helped students acquire both declarative and procedural knowledge of listening strategies and raise their awareness of using listening strategies.They developed a clear idea of listening strategies through the teacher’s explicit explanation and could use these listening strategies in combination,varying their use according to the needs of the specific situation after practice.Students also gained greater self-confidence in listening strategy use and took a positive attitude to listening strategies.(2)Students’ listening comprehension proficiency can be increased by listening strategy instruction.The students’ increased strategy use positively influenced their listening comprehension scores.The students in EC got significantly higher scores than the CC after listening strategy instruction,and their posttest scores were also significantly higher than the pre-test.Students develop listening comprehension ability from the use of listening strategies to identify,process deeply,and retain key information so as to finish listening activities effectively.These findings support that the listening strategy instruction has positive effects on promoting listening strategy use and ultimately on improving listening comprehension through increased strategy use.Based on the findings drawn above,some suggestions for listening teaching were proposed.In daily listening teaching,teachers should conduct text analysis carefully to select appropriate listening strategies to teach and design diverse listening strategy training activities to improve their listening strategy instruction.