Listening Comprehension Strategies And The Teaching Of English Listening Comprehension In Middle School

Listening is one of the four basic language skills. It is of great significance for the middle school students to improve their listening comprehension ability. However, listening comprehension strategies are important factors that influence the listeners' listening comprehension process. Most researchers and scholars think that O'Malley & Chamot's (1990) three-way division of the learning strategies, namely meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies, can be the framework of the classification of listening strategies. Therefore, the author prepares a questionnaire with 20 listening comprehension strategies according to such division. Then the author randomly chooses 90 students from senior Grade Two as the subjects and gives them the questionnaire and two listening comprehension tests. 30 subjects also receive 8-week listening strategy training. After making an analysis of the data collected from the questionnaire and the two tests, the author finds that middle school students do employ some listening comprehension strategies to help improve their listening comprehension ability although they don't know much of listening comprehension strategies or seldom use most of the strategies. Besides, the results indicate that different students employ different listening strategies and that the frequency of the students' listening strategy use has significant effect on the outcome of their listening tests. Accordingly, the author makes some suggestions to improve the teaching of English listening comprehension in middle school .For example, in the daily classroom teaching, all Chinese middle school teachers of English should pay more attention to the students' learning strategies. Teachers should be familiar with the strategy use of the students. And then they might promote the students' listening comprehension ability and improve the teaching of English listening in middle school by training them how to employ various listening comprehension strategies.