A Study Of Senior High School Students’ Use Of English Listening Strategies

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are the four basic skills of English learning.And among four basic skills,listening skill ranks the top,its importance speaks for itself(Liang Yuanping,2018).The author believes that the improvement of students’ listening comprehension abilities contributes to promoting their abilities of speaking,reading and writing.When students master listening strategies and apply listening strategies in listening training flexibly,they can further improve their listening abilities to some extent.Therefore,with the instruction of Input Hypothesis Theory and Meta-cognitive Theory,the present study investigates 209 students and 6teachers from Qin Zhou Number One Middle School by adopting instruments of a questionnaire and interview,to investigate the general situation of students’ use of English listening strategies in Qin Zhou Number One Middle School.Meanwhile,the questionnaire was designed based on Oxford’s Strategies Inventory for Language Learning,and the reliability of this questionnaire is.792,which means this questionnaire is suitable to be applied in the research.The present study aims to answer the following questions:(1)What English listening strategies have the senior high school students mastered?(2)What is the correlation between the students’ use of English listening strategies and their listening grades?(3)What are the difficulties the students encounter in their listening comprehension?The research results show that:(1)Currently,the general picture of senior high school students’ use of listening strategies is relatively good,most of them have mastered listening strategies,among which cognitive strategy is the most popular strategy,followed by meta-cognitive strategy,emotional strategy together with social strategy.(2)There is a close correlation between students’ use of their listening strategies and their English listening grades,and significant differences exist among different students in terms of applying listening strategies.Moreover,the higher the students’ English listening grades,the more likely they tend to apply listening strategies.(3)Three main difficulties in students’ listening comprehension: students lack vocabulary and can not identify words of reduction,liaison as well as homonym.Moreover,they also believed long sentences are hard to understand.According to the research results,the author put forward some suggestions for teachers and students in order to promote students applying listening strategies better.As for the teachers:(1)cultivating students’ awareness of using listening strategies;(2)helping them to improve their English levels;(3)creating a favorable environment to cultivate students’ listening habits;(4)transforming teaching philosophy.As for the students:(1)communicating with teachers and classmates to acquire more effective learning methods;(2)reading more English books to increase their vocabulary and enhance their comprehension ability;(3)practicing their English listening by listening to tapes repeatedly or watching English movies along with programs;(4)improving self-efficacy.Moreover,there are still some deficiencies in the present study,and the author did not take into consideration the combination of teachers and students from different senior high schools,more reasonable suggestions on students’ use of listening strategies have not been put forward in the present study.The theoretical basis of foreign literature is relatively insufficient to some extent.The author only adopted instruments of questionnaire and interview to investigate senior high school students’ use of listening strategies.Therefore,the author presents some suggestions for future similar studies.More students from different senior high schools should be invited to participate in the research,and it is necessary to combine more literature at home and abroad and apply more research instruments in the study.