| Listening is the most important skill among the four basic language learning skills, and listening comprehension plays a significant role in language acquisition and daily communication. However, the current situation of English study in China is far from satisfactory. English listening comprehension is the weak point of many students, especially for vocational college students who are still struggling helplessly in their process of English learning. The reasons for this phenomenon are many-faceted, and the lack of language learning strategies is one of them. Therefore, how to raise students'listening proficiency level becomes very urgent.In order to explore the way to improve students'listening efficiency, the author made this study by designing two questionnaires and conducting a term of listening comprehension training. According to the listening situation of higher vocational college students, based on the learning strategy theory advocated by O'Malley& Chamot (1990):metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies, combined with Boyle's three types of factors affecting listening comprehension:listeners'factors, speakers'factors and factors in the material and medium, two listening strategy questionnaires were designed and analyzed, with two classes of 78 higher vocational college EFL learners from Qiushi vocational and technical college taken as the subjects. The results of questionnaire I indicate that the major difficulties that listeners usually encounter in listening activities are the following:the appearance of unfamiliar words in listening materials, anxiety while listening, failing to understand the whole passage even though when most of the words are familiar to them and forgetting the aural message too quickly. Through questionnaire I, the author investigated the difficulties students encounter in their listening comprehension. Besides, according to the questionnaire results, the author conducted a term of listening strategy training experiment. The two chosen classes have almost the same level of listening proficiency. One of the two classes was randomly chosen as the experimental group, the other as the control group, students of these two classes were asked to take two listening comprehension tests after the experimental group accepted a term of listening strategy training while the control group only conducted the ordinary listening activity without any experimental interfere. By making comparison of the scores between the experimental group and the control group in the post training tests, we come to the conclusion that listening strategy training has great positive effect on listening comprehension. The lack of using appropriate listening strategies is one of the reasons that result in students'poor listening proficiency. Questionnaireâ…¡was designed to investigate whether there was any difference between the experimental group and the control group, and to what extent the difference was, in the usage of listening strategies in ordinary listening activities and post training tests. The results of questionnaireâ…¡indicate that through listening strategy training, listeners can use listening strategies more frequently and more consciously. At last, the results of this investigation are presented. Based on the major findings, suggestions are made that to make listening comprehension more effective; listeners should have a comprehensive system of knowledge about what kind of listening strategies they should use, and how to use these strategies effectively and frequently to cope with the obstacles in their listening comprehension process. Meanwhile, this investigation also gives its implications for English teaching. |
