A Study Of The Correlation Between English Listening Strategies And Listening Academic Achievements In A High School

Language is an important tool in communication. For the purpose of communication,people use language to exchange ideas and information. Listening is one of the importantaspects of language communication competence, which is an important symbol of Englishintegrated skills. But at present in high school English classes, teachers and students inChina have misunderstood the role of listening in English learning. Listening is regarded asa passive competence, which is just for the requirement of exams. Thus, a study on thecorrelation between English listening strategies and listening academic achievements inhigh schools can make a contribution to the English teaching in China.The author carried out a study on listening strategies of high school students by using aquestionnaire and other tools. The study is intended to investigate and analyze how highschool students use listening strategies, whether it is relevant to students’ listeningacademic achievements and if it is related, which strategies affect students’ academicachievements, so that teachers can help high school students know better about how to uselistening strategies and how to improve their English listening academic achievements.The following three questions are addressed in the study.1. What English listening strategies are employed by the high school students?2. Is there any correlation between English listening strategies and listening academicachievements? If yes, to what extent?3. Are there any differences between good learners and poor learners in using listeningstrategies? If yes, what are they?The findings of the study are summarized as follows.1. When listening, high school students mainly employ five strategies. They alwaysuse Form-focused Strategy and Meaning-focused Strategy. Meanwhile, they sometimes useMetacognitive Strategy, Mother-tongue Strategy and Social-affective Strategy.2. The listening academic achievements of high school students are related toCognitive Strategy and Social-affective Strategy, while they are not related to Metacongnitive Strategy.3. The differences between good learners and poor learners lie in the employment ofCognitive Strategy, particularly in Meaning-focused Strategy. Good learners tend to betteremploy association, inference and prediction skills and they can better deal with anxiety aswell.Finally, based on the findings of the study, the author recommends three pieces ofadvice in teaching listening. Firstly, teachers should help raise students’ awareness ofMetacongnitive Strategy and help them know how to learn by themselves. Secondly,teachers should strengthen the training of Cognitive Strategy and improve their listeningability. Thirdly, teachers should pay attention to the training of Social-affective Strategy torelief them from anxiety.