A Study On Listening Cognitive Strategies Of Senior High School Students Based On Think-Aloud Protocols

Listening is one of the basic skills in English learning,and mastering listening strategies is helpful to improve the students’ listening proficiency in English learning.Listening cognitive strategy,which is employed in the whole process of listening,is a method and skill for students to process the information they hear in order to complete the listening task and obtain effective information.Thinking Aloud Protocol is one of the methods of foreign language teaching and research,which is helpful to understand the thinking process of the subjects.Therefore,the study of listening cognitive strategies based on thinking aloud protocol is helpful to better understand students’ cognitive process and cognitive strategies in listening.This study takes 12 first-year students at a senior high school in Zhangzhou,Fujian Province as participants,and is primarily concerned with the following three questions:(1)How do high school students use cognitive strategies in listening comprehension?(2)For different listening tasks(short conversation,long conversation,monologue),what are the differences in the use of cognitive strategies by the first-year students at a senior high school?(3)Are there differences in the use of cognitive strategies in listening comprehension among senior high school students with different listening levels? If there are differences,in what ways do they actually perform?According to the transcript of thinking aloud,it is found that: Firstly,there are 12 cognitive strategies adopted by the participants in listening comprehension,among which selective attention strategy is the most frequently used,followed by note-taking strategy translation strategy and inferencing strategy.Secondly,there are differences in the cognitive strategies used by the participants in order to complete the three different listening tasks(short conversation,long conversation and monologue).Specifically,the frequency of the employment of listening cognitive strategies following the order from top to bottom is up to197 times in long conversation task,99 times in short conversation task and 54 times in monologue task.In addition,the participants tend to use selective attention strategies and note-taking strategies both in short conversation tasks and long conversation ones,while they use selective attention strategies and translation strategies in monologue tasks.Finally,in the process of listening comprehension,the participants with different listening levels have differences in the frequency of the employment of listening cognitive strategies.There are also differences in the employment of selective attention strategy,note-taking strategy translation strategy and inferencing strategy.Specifically,the participants with low listening level adopt selective attention strategies much more frequently than those with high listening level while the participants in the middle and high level groups use note-taking strategies,translation strategy and inferencing strategies significantly higher than those in the low level group.According to the above findings,this paper puts forward some suggestions for listening teaching at a senior high school where teachers are required to strengthen the cultivation of students’ awareness of using listening cognitive strategies,implement the training of listening cognitive strategies and attach importance to individual differences in order to teach students according to their aptitudes.This study,based on the thinking aloud protocol,reveals the implicit thinking process in English listening comprehension and the influence of different listening comprehension tasks and different listening levels on students’ use of listening cognitive strategies at a senior high school.At the same time,this case study plays an enlightening role in the data collection for the methodology of cognitive strategies.