An Investigation And Analysis Of English Listening Strategies Employed By Uygur Min Kao Min English Majors In Xinjiang

Listening provides understandable input for second language acquisition, and it also plays an important role in our daily communication. In China, the study on listening strategies starts from 1990s. However, up to date the study on minority students'listening strategies has not gained enough emphasis, and there is almost no study on Uygurs'English listening strategies. Therefore, the present study, adopting quantitative and qualitative methods, selects Uygur min kao min English majors as subjects to study their overall trend of using listening strategies and the differences in using listening strategies between high—score and low—score listeners.The 156 subjects in the present study come from Kashgar teachers'college and Xinjiang Education Institution, all of them are min kao min Uygur English majors coming from different parts of Xinjiang. Data collection was carried out in 2007.12 and 2008.12. At last, SPSS 12.0 is used to analyze the data. The analytical results indicate that:1). Generally speaking, Uygur English majors'adoption of listening strategies is high. Specifically, the adoption of planning, evaluation, monitoring, new words, marking, elaboration, prediction, mother tongue using, affective—control, help—seeking and multi—media using are"usually used"while the adoption of Chinese using, Han culture influence and native culture influence are"sometimes used". Probably, this kind of overall trend is related to their language and culture to some extent.2). There is significant difference between high—score and low—score listeners in using some of the listening strategies. Specifically speaking, compared with low—score listeners, high—score listeners adopt planning strategy, monitoring strategy, new words strategy, marking strategy, elaboration, prediction and multi—media using strategies more frequently. This indicates that meaning—based top—down processing is especially important in listening comprehension. Some implications and suggestions can also be obtained from the results.1). The present study provide some theoretical reference for the study on third language learners'acquisition of target language.2). For Uygur min kao min English majors, they should be clear what strategies should be used under specific circumstances.3). For Uygur English majors, they should learn to adopt the meaning—based top—down processing model during listening.4). For Uygur English majors, they should remember words by its English meaning, because the translation from English to Chinese and then to Uygur will be a heavy burden for them, which will impede the processing greatly. Furthermore, the teaching of Chinese should also be strengthened to avoid the translation from Chinese to Uygur.