Comparative Study Of Clcs Of Elementary And Intermediate Overseas Students

As one of the basic language skills, listening comprehension plays a significant role in daily communication and language learning. Listening comprehension is anything but a passive activity. In listening process, learners actively search for meanings. In order to get a deeper understanding of how learners study listening, researchers both home and abroad have made many investigations on listening comprehension strategies. However, in the field of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (TCSOL), the research into listening comprehension strategies is still in the initial stage and far from meeting the requirements of TCSOL. Under such a circumstance, this study was conducted. It aims to make surveys and comparisons on overseas students'employment of listening strategies at proficiency level and gender level.The subjects involved in this study are 55 overseas students from Chongqing University, Southwest University, Chongqing Normal University and Sichuan International Studies University. Two instruments were used in the current study: one is listening strategy questionnaires, the other is interview which serves as a supplementary instrument. All the subjects were asked to complete the listening strategy questionnaires. The data were collected and analyzed in SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) software.The research results revealed that: 1. Among three sub-strategies, social-affective strategies are most frequently used by foreign students, followed by cognitive strategies and meta-cognitive strategies. As far as sub-category strategies are concerned, self-encouragement, directed attention, questioning, selective attention, repetition and elaboration. Some strategies are least used by the participants such as planning, motoring and evaluation, translation, new word and self-management. 2. Elementary students use self-encouragement and directed attention most often, then followed by questioning and selective attention. For intermediate students, the most frequently used strategies are: directed attention, self-encouragement, repetition, questioning, predicting and note-taking. They use self-management, inferencing and note-taking significantly differently. 3. Both male and female listeners in this study employ self-encouragement and directed attention most frequently. Generally, females employ more listening strategies than male listeners. They use new word, repetition, translation, self-encouragement and selective attention significantly differently.In the final part, some implications were drawn from the findings in the hope of facilitating the listening teaching of TCSOL.