An Empirical Study On English Listening Strategy Training

In the listening, speaking, reading, writing and interpreting language skills, listening is the basic skill for other four language skills. However English listening ability is relatively hard for the senior middle school students to improve in a short period of time and listening is often easily ignored in classroom English learning.As the new round English reform goes on from2014, it will become crucial for the teachers to pay more attention to listening teaching. There are many theoretical and empirical researches about the learning strategy training at home and abroad, but the listening strategy training lacks enough research attention. The study mainly focused on the effectiveness of the listening strategy training in the listening classroom. In the four-month time, the author did listening strategy training in the experimental class, while in the control class students did not accept the listening strategy training.In the listening strategy training process, the researcher adopted test, questionnaire, interview and listening strategy diary to discover the influence of the listening strategy training on the listeners’ listening ability. The study aims to answer the following four questions:1) What impacts does the listening strategy training have on the experimental class students’ listening strategy ability at the end of the semester?2) What are the differences of the male and female students’listening strategy in the experimental class at the end of the semester?3) What are the differences of the top and poor students’listening strategy in the experimental class at the end of the semester?4) What are the differences of the listening comprehension ability between the experimental class and the control class at the end of the semester?The study lasted for sixteen weeks in four months. The one hundred participants are all from the Nanyang Yudong Middle School in Huguan county of Changzhi city. This is a private school in a small county. They are all in Grade Two of senior middle school. The two classes are almost the same in listening ability and each class has fifty students. And theteacher, the listening practice time and listening materials are the same for the two classesexcept the listening activities. One of the classes is experimental class, the other is controlclass. At the end of the semester, the researcher tested the students’ listening proficiency andinterviewed the students. Then the author analyzed the data with SPSS19.0.After analyzing the data with SPSS19.0, the researcher drew the following conclusionsfor previous research questions:1) At the end of the semester, students’ listening strategy awareness and listening strategyability improved more than before in17listening strategies in the experimental class. Theydid not show improvement only in the following4strategies: planning strategy, advancedorganization strategy, elaboration strategy and clarification strategy.2) At the end of the semester, there were no significant differences between girls and boysin18listening strategies in the experimental class, there were differences only in thefollowing3listening strategies: advanced organization strategy, self-monitoring strategy andlowering anxiety strategy. Girls performed better than boys in the three listening strategies.3) At the end of the semester, the listening strategy performance of the top students wasbetter than the poor students in19listening strategies in the experimental class. There were nosignificant differences only in the following2listening strategies: elaboration strategy andclarification strategy.4) At the end of the semester, both the experimental class and the control class showedimprovement in the post listening test, but there were no significant differences between thetwo classes in listening ability according to the independent sample test.This study will benefit for the study of the listening strategy training. The listeningstrategy training activities will help students improve their listening autonomy and listeningcomprehension ability.