An Investigation Into Chinese English Majors' Autonomous Listening

Ever since"learner autonomy"was first formally put forward by Henri Holec in 1981, there is a flourishing of research on this hot issue. However, almost all of these studies focus on autonomous English learning as a whole. Studies devoted specifically to investigating students'autonomous listening can barely be spotted; furthermore, in China, the relevant studies mainly take non-English majors as their subjects. As listening is of great importance in one's English study, it deserves more attention and support. Moreover, to have a clear picture concerning students'characteristics of autonomous listening will certainly provide teachers with some insight and guidance in their future listening teaching. Thus, the present study aims to investigate Chinese English majors'autonomous listening. In addition, as it is known to all, listening comprehension strategies play a critical role in English listening study. Therefore, a clear idea about students'strategy use in their listening will further clarify the picture of students'autonomous listening.Taking all of the above into consideration, the author has carried out the current research through a questionnaire study. The main body of the questionnaire can be divided into two sections. The first section is about students'use of listening comprehension strategies, which are based on and adapted from Goh's (2002) classification of listening comprehension strategies; whereas the second section is devoted to students'actual situation of autonomous listening, which takes Dickinson's (1993) description of the characteristics of an autonomous language learner as its basis. As far as the subjects are concerned, they are 112 English majors in two Grades (i.e. Grade 1 and Grade 3) from Huazhong University of Science and Technology.The results of the study show that there are no significant differences between the two groups of students in terms of their strategy use, both generally and in each item. All of them do well in this aspect; however, they fail to adopt those effective listening strategies very successfully. As for their actual situation of autonomous listening, there are generally no significant differences between them either, even though they have shared some differences in some specific items. Students in both groups do neither well nor badly in this respect. Additionally, for either group of students, there are strong correlations between their strategy use and their autonomous listening.Based on the results, it is suggested that learner training should be provided so as to help learners become more autonomous in their English listening. Furthermore, the current teaching mode needs reform so as to suit learners'needs better. Last but not least, teachers should be more involved in helping learners to become more autonomous and effective in their English listening study.