Promoting Listening Strategies Training as a Way of Improving Students

Promoting listening strategies training to improve EFL Chinese college students’ listening comprehension

Abstraction: This essay mainly focuses on exploring the effective strategies for EFL learners in Chinese college to improve their listening comprehension ability. Based on the theories of listening comprehension process and listening strategies used by successful and unsuccessful listeners, principles are concluded. Concerning the current listening teaching situation in China, according to the principles, a task is designed to solve the problems existing in the listening comprehension teaching especially the listening strategy training.

1. Introduction

2.1. Research background

Listening, as a part of four skills of language learning, determines the proficiency level of certain language. As a main task, undoubtedly, listening ability effects not only the result of language assessments but also people’s understanding of others’ utterances in real life. In English learning, listening is regarded as a psychological process with some aspects under conscious control, while others are not under the direct control. The conscious part of listening is developed into “strategies” which helps listener achieve certain goals. The term “strategy” or “learning strategy” is used in applied linguistic literature (e.g. O’Malley and Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990; Vandergrift, 1997) to refer to all “thoughts and actions that assist learning” (Rost, 2002).

Listening strategy, developed from learning strategy, has been very active since the early 1990, started by O’Malley and Chamot (1990), Oxford (1990). Later, Vandergrift (1997) improves the strategy training in listening comprehension by continuous experiments among high school students of French. He concludes the difference of strategies used between effective and less effective listeners. In recent years, several researchers tend to focus on examining the effect of metacognitive strategies (e.g. Birjandi, 2012;...