A Study On English Listening Strategy Use Among Rural Junior Middle School Students

Listening is one of the basic skills in language competence.It plays a vital role in our daily life as well as in language learning.The development of foreign language listening skills has demonstrated a beneficial impact on the development of other skills,however,foreign language listening remains the least researched of all four language skills.Compared with listening in mother tongue,listening in foreign language cannot be acquired easily.Thus,it’s extremely important for students to know how to listen effectively,especially for the beginners,which can be answered by the use of listening strategies.Although lots of researchers have already conducted researches on listening strategies,the subjects of these researches were mainly college students or vocational students and researches on the use of listening strategies of beginners were few.Meanwhile,it was found that the present situation of rural junior middle school students’ English listening is not optimistic.Therefore,it’s necessary and worthwhile to take rural junior middle school students as research subjects of researches on listening strategy use.This research was conducted on 180 students in Grade Eight from Pingle Nine-year Compulsory School and Gaogeng Nine-year Compulsory School in Qionglai,Chengdu.The concrete quantitative analysis method was adopted to analyze the data from the questionnaires and the qualitative analysis method was employed to analyze the data of the interview.The purposes of this research were to know the present situation of the use of listening strategies among rural junior middle school students,to explore the reasons behind the present situation and to give rural junior middle school teachers some pedagogic suggestions on how to train their students to use listening strategies effectively.The findings of the study were as follows:First,rural junior middle school students employed listening strategies at a medium frequency level.Social/affective strategies were seldom employed and they tended to employ cognitive strategies,especially translation strategy and repetition strategy,rather than meta-cognitive strategies in the process of listening.Moreover,statistical significant differences in listening strategy use between girls and boys existed,and statistical significant differences in listening strategy use between proficient listeners and less-proficient listeners listeners also existed.Girls and proficient listeners employed a greater variety of listening strategies and employed them at a higher frequency level than boys and less-proficient listeners respectively.Second,the causes behind the present situation of listening strategy use among rural junior middle school students were mainly from two aspects-the lack of knowledge of listening strategies and the lack of listening strategy awareness.Third,three suggestions for rural junior middle school teachers to train rural junior middle school students the use of listening strategies were put forward.The first one was that rural junior middle school teachers should strengthen listening strategy-based instructions.The second one was that rural junior middle school teachers should raise students’ awareness of listening strategy use.The last one was that rural junior middle school teachers should help their students practice positive listening strategies with the help of different kinds of listening materials.Meanwhile,to make sure that teachers could understand better,a sample plan was given.It was expected that students and teachers in rural junior middle schools could get some implications from this research to change the present situation of teaching and learning of English listening in rural junior middle schools.