On The Effects Of Strategy-based Instruction On Chinese Senior Middle School Students' English Self-efficacy And Listening Proficiency

Ever since the adoption of the policy of opening to the outside world, English has been drawing increasing attention in China, and English proficiency has been regarded as a basic part of an individual's ability. Among the four English skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing), listening is the first, therefore the most basic one. What's more, with the education reform, listening comprehension plays a more and more important role in helping learners pass all kinds of entrance examinations, which is the main and final target of most English learners, especially senior middle school students. So English listening proficiency is more and more essential to Chinese senior middle school students. But it is the case that in China, most students cannot often touch English listening comprehension in their everyday life, even in their classrooms. As a result, most high school students are very poor in English listening comprehension after they have had almost eight years' or even more experience in learning English throughout their primary school and junior middle school. So listening has rightly assumed a central role in English learning.There have been a great number of researches showing that students' listening ability has close connection with listening strategies adopted by them. In this thesis, listening learning strategies refer to specific behaviors, steps, techniques, methods or approaches that students use, often intentionally, to facilitate their process in internalizing, storing, recalling, retention and application of information about what has been heard in the target language. Although all students apply kinds of listening learning strategies, effective and ineffective learners show obvious difference in making use of strategies in the whole listening process. Due to the fact that in China, most senior middle school students improve their listening proficiency mainly through taking part in listening classes in their classrooms, strategy-based instruction is the most practical and the most often used method to foster the students' listening learning strategy use and awareness. Strategy-based instruction is a typical kind of strategy training, which aims to raise learners' awareness of learning strategies and provide learners with systematic practice, reinforcement and self-monitoring of their strategy use while attending to languages activities. Through this reactive approach to learning, learners' knowledge of strategy becomes procedural and an affirmative backwash effect motivation levels, self-efficacy, learner autonomy, transfer skills, and language proficiency will result at last. Through strategy-based instruction, learners can experience systematic training in applying strategies to the learning and using of the target language. Strategy- based instruction makes it possible for learners to learn learning strategies and develop their strategic competence in a natural way under the classroom environments, and experience systematic training in applying strategies to the learning and using English.Self-efficacy, which is a central concept in Bandura's social cognitive theory, refers to the confidence that the learner has in his or her ability to perform any given task or...