A Study Of Listening Strategies Among Non-English Major Junior College Students

Listening is the basic element of the four basic skills of English learning. It plays a very important role in international communication and English learning. However, most of the students think that listening is the biggest problem they have to face. While doing listening practice, many students just focus on vocabulary building and language knowledge and ignore the use of learning strategies. This situation would bring about their inefficient learning and they can't quickly make progress. As time goes on, people begin to pay attention to learning strategies and realize that mastering proper leaning strategies is helpful in learning. As far as listening training is concerned, listening strategies become a new region of research of second language acquisition and listening strategies get more attention from people.Listening strategies research is based on the theory of learning strategies which consists of three part - Meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, and social/affective strategies. Meta-cognitive strategies include self-management, self-evaluation, self-monitoring, planning and so on. Cognitive strategies include transfer, contextualization, grouping, deduction, and recombination and so on. Social/affective strategies include cooperation and classification. These three strategies would help students from the perspective of knowledge of language, self-management, and psychological situations. Thus the learners could make reasonable planning according to their own situation so as to improve their knowledge of language and the skills of implication. At the same time, they adjust themselves mentally to meet with the purpose of improving listening ability.Based on the instruments of questionnaire and interviews, this thesis is intended to make an investigation of the 220 non-English majors in junior college in Henan Education College. Being junior learners and non-English majors, most students have poor learning foundation and low interest in listening and some don't ever like learning English. This thesis conducts an experiment among 220 non- English majors in junior college to analyze how well they use listening strategies and to make comparison between successful students and less successful students, male students and female students, and finally presents suggestions about the training of listening comprehension strategies.This thesis includes six chapters. Chapter one is an introduction. It briefly gives an introduction of the background of the research, the purpose and the significance of the research.Chapter two is about the rationale and literature review. At first it gives an introduction of listening comprehension which includes definition, listening comprehension process, models of listening comprehension and factors affecting listening comprehension. And then it presents the development of language learning strategy, the definition of learning strategy, classification and typical characteristics, and the development of listening strategies research both in China and in western countries.Chapter three is about the methodology. It includes the research problems, subjects, methods, instruments and the research procedure. The statistics are collected from questionnaire and interview.Chapter four includes the discussion about the results of the investigation. It aims at these problems:(1) the general situation of the employment of listening strategies of non-English majors in junior college; (2) the differences of listening strategy use between successful students and less successful students and that between male students and female students.Chapter five presents some suggestions for guiding teachers to train the students on using English listening strategy.Chapter six reiterates the findings of the investigation and point out the limitation of the research and possible future study of the research.