A Study On English Listening Comprehension Strategies Under Multiple Situations

Listening comprehension strategy plays an important role in learners’ listeningcomprehension. To have a better understanding of listening material listeners always usestrategies when they are fulfilling a listening task and self-access learning centers aremore and more used to practice listening and special listening class is canceled.However, former studies on self-access centers are seldom related to listening strategy.So the current study on listening comprehension strategy is necessary. According todifferent situations where listening input is give, the author raised three questions:1)what is the application of listening strategy as a whole for non-English majors?2) Whatis the application of listening strategy under testing, non-testing and self-access centersituations? What are the differences of their employment in these situations?3) What isthe application of listening strategy by learners of the two genders? What about studentswith different language proficiencies?The author first used a questionnaire and interviews to collect data from thenon-English majors in Chongqing University. Then the data were put into SPSS13.0. atthe same time descriptive statistics, One-Way ANOVA and the frequency scale byOxford are employed to analyze the data.It is found that: subjects do not have strong meta-cognitive awareness; they cannotsupervise their performance or make plans on English listening. Though learning inself-access centers is not regarded as a testing or non-testing situation, the strategy useis similar to a testing situation and there is no significant difference under self-accesscenter and testing situations; the use of meta-cognitive, cognitive and social affectivestrategy shows significant difference under testing and non-testing, non-testing andself-access center situations. Females use strategy more frequently than males; highproficiency subjects use meta-cognitive and cognitive strategy more frequently thanmedium and low proficiency subjects; but medium proficiency subjects use socialaffective strategy more frequently than the other two proficiency level subjects and it isnot true that the higher subjects’ proficiency is, the more frequently they use strategies.