A Study Of Listening Strategy Training Of Non-english Majors From The Perspective Of Synergy Theory

This is a fairly common phenomenon that many Chinese English learners areable to understand what the writer wants to express by reading easily but can hardlyget what the speaker is talking about. Therefore, how to deal with students’ listeningdifficulties and improve their listening ability becomes the focus of many researchersin second language learning and teaching. Some studies have proved that learningstrategies can have a positive effect on the improvement of students’ reading, writingand listening abilities (Lou Heying,2004), which in certain sense indicates theteachability of listening strategies. However, in foreign language learning andteaching, how to teach those strategies—how to help students to choose whichstrategies to learn, how to learn them and how to use them properly—needs ourfurther study.Listening strategy learning is a process which is influenced by both objective andsubjective factors, so in order to improve students’ listening comprehension abilitythrough listening strategies, dealing with those factors properly becomes fairlyimportant. Therefore, this thesis tries to explore how to teach them through thelistening strategy training based on the Synergy Theory that tends to emphasize thecooperation and interaction between different systems which help to solve theproblem and to achieve a better development of the whole system. Since listeningstrategy training mainly involves the synergies between the student and the teacher,between the student and the student and between the internal factors of the student, inthe process of listening strategy training, the trainer needs to make great efforts todeal with the three synergies to improve students’ listening comprehension ability.In order to know whether the listening strategy training based on the SynergyTheory can make a positive effect on students’ listening ability, three classes of117non-English majors were randomly chosen from Yangtze University College of Artsand Science to accept a two-month listening strategy training based on the SynergyTheory. Listening strategies chosen for the training are based on the results of a questionnaire carried out to investigate students’ listening difficulties and the data gotfrom questionnaires and pre-tests and post-tests are then put into the database andfinally analyzed through the software of SPSS3.10after collected from thosequestionnaires and tests.According to the results of the data and analysis from the experiment, thesefindings come eventually:(1) experimental students’ listening scores are improvedthrough the training and the degree of improvement is obviously higher than that ofthe control class’ listening scores;(2) experimental students use those listeningstrategies more frequently and consciously than before the training;(3) experimentalstudents become more confident in English listening than before the training. Besides,it’s also found that students of lower-level students make a much greater improvementin listening tests than the higher-level students.