The Comprehension Strategies Of High School Listeners:A Think-aloud Protocols Study

Listening,a major channel for language acquisition is highly regarded by more and more language learners and teachers.Mastering listening strategies is considered to be a breakthrough in students' efforts to improve their listening ability.Traditional listening trainings,which are usually result-targeted,aim at improving students'listening proficiency by providing great amounts of comprehensible listening materials to learners,with strategies input generally ignored.However,as the saying goes,it is better to teach how to fish than to give much fish.Strategy learning actually plays a key role in the improvement of listening ability.As far as I know,there are not many previous researches focusing on listening strategies,most of which were conducted by handing out questionnaires to undergraduate students,and few of these researches targeted at high-school students.This study is based on a research of 12 senior high second-year students from the best high-school in Fuqing by applying a listening think-aloud procedure.Its objective is to answer three questions:1)How do high-school English learners use listening strategies?2)What's the relationship between listening ability and the frequency of strategy use?3)What is the relationship between gender and the frequency of strategy use?According to data collected in the research,the author found,first,almost all students preferred to use cognitive strategies,followed by the meta-cognitive strategies,while the social/affective strategies are used least often.Second,cognitive strategies were observed to be positively correlated to listening ability while meta-strategies and social/affective strategies were not significantly positive correlated.Meta-cognitive strategies were much more often used by high-level students than others,such as advance organization,directed attention,selective attention,double-check and problem identification.Among these strategies,advance organization was hardly reported by mid-level and low-level listeners.The least successful students were quite unaware of the mentioned strategies.Only some of them used double-check and problem identification.Cognitive strategies,as well,differently applied by three level students,high-level being the No.1 who frequently reported repetition and inference.Comparing with low-level students who seldom report other strategies besides note-taking and inference,mid-level students who preferred translation most,though,bore a better awareness of cognitive strategies.Participants who used strategies more often generally got higher mark than those who didn't,which shows that listening strategies are quite necessary for listens.Besides,gender differences in strategy use were quite minimal.Based on a statistical analysis,the author then tentatively put forward some teaching suggestions.