Applicationoflisteningstrategiestolisteningteachinginmiddleschool.doc

Application of listening strategies to listening teaching in middle school
1. Introduction
Among the four basic language skills, listening has long been said to be a passive or receptive skill, which does not need too much effort. However, Vandergrift, a Canadian scholar, says that “listening isn’t a passive activity to the full extent but a quite complex active process.” (Vandergrift, 1999:44) In this process, learners have to tell from speech sounds, apprehend connotations of stresses and tones, comprehend vocabulary and grammar and so on. John Morley defines listening as “everything that impinges on the human processing which medicates between sound and the construction.” (John Morley,1991:88) Many arguments made by scholars have confirmed that listening is an active process rather than a straightforward process of sound to meaning as it is assumed by most people(Michael Rost,1992:34; Anderson＆Lynch,1988:37; Brown,1990:10)
It is not until recently that teachers in middle school have gradually realized the importance of listening teaching. For quite a long time, in teaching listening, many English teachers only play tapes, giving no clues to the students. In most cases, they expose listening materials to the students, and then conduct tests to examine how much the students have understood in terms of a lot of comprehension exercises (usually in the form of multiple choice) instead of teaching students how to listen and how to deal with their listening problems, let alone imparting listening strategies to them to develop their listening ability. As a result, listening class is only used as a means of testing students’ listening comprehension rather than a means of enabling them to master listening skills. The students have not been given enough opportunities to practice listening or listening strategies.
In order to help students improve their listening, a growing number of educators are doing researches in this field. They have found that listening strategies play a positive role in facilitating students’ language learning process (Wen Qiufang, 2002; Field, 1998:112). Almost all listeners use listening strategies in language classroom, either consciously or unconsciously. Researches or studies have indicated or shown that the appropriate use of listening strategies can promote language acquisition. So, it is necessary for English teachers to study listening strategies, to make the students aware of their importance, and to help them learn to use those strategies effectively so that they can learn the target language more efficiently.
What the effect of the strategies on English listening has long bothered English teachers. During my two-month teaching practice in English, I showed great interest in this topic. I conducted a six-week experiment in DangGangXinQu middle school in ZhenJiang, with the purpose to explore the effect of listening strategies on listening teaching. Six weeks later, I had a talk with my subjects, from which I got positive information. Most students favored my experiment and showed that their listening ability has been improved.
2. Listening teaching in middle school in China
2.1Current situation of listening teaching in middle school in China
Krashen (1982:24) once pointed out that in the learning and use of the languages, listening is the most important part among listening, speaking, reading and writing. 【1】 No matter who the language learners are, children or grown-ups, they will have confidence in language learning only when their listening abilities are fully developed. Thus we can conclude that listening is significant in facilitating a good command of a foreign language as well as in stimulating learners’ motivation and arousing learners’ positive affection to the learning of foreign languages.
However, listening teaching in middle schools still lags behind. According to my observation, the classroom of teaching listening in middle schools is only a place where teachers provide students with large amount of listening materials. Professor Wang Zongyan once said, “In listening class, it is not unusual that teachers just play recorders without giving any hints.” 【2】As a matter of fact, in listening class, all that students have to do is to listen to the tape-recorder and then answer the questions, while the teachers simply play the tape-recorder and check the students’ answers. Students play a rather passive role in listening class since they are given few chances to practice English. Teachers seldom teach students how to employ proper strategies in listening. This phenomenon results from many causes and the following part will analyze the main causes from aspects of teachers, students and listening materials.
2.2Main causes for current teaching situation
2.2.1 Teachers
Teachers in the listening class are traditionally looked on as guides, or even worse, tape-players. 【3】Most students think they can get little help from their teachers in listening class and teachers think there is little they can do to help the students. Typically, teachers pay too much attention to the teaching of language knowledge rather than to the training of students’ listening ability and strategy-applying ability. While proposing the student-centered teaching methodology, the important role of teachers in the listening class should not be overlooked, a teacher should treat himself/herself as a guide to impart some techniques to his/her students to help them improve their listening ability【4】.
2.2.2 Factors influencing students’ listening comprehension
Generally speaking, successful listening largely depends on students’ themselves. They will do quite a good job if they show great interest in listening and they will definitely make great progress if they choose proper listening strategies. Many factors exert an impact on listening activity. From the perspective of the nature of listening ability, we find the factors influencing listening comprehension are mainly linguistic knowledge, background information and psychological factors.
ⅠLinguistic knowledge
Linguistic knowledge includes pronunciation, tone, vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure. On the whole, students’ essential techniques in English are not very sound, especially in pronunciation, tone and some colloquial expressions. Middle school students are insensitive to pronunciation and incapable of distinguishing words’ pronunciation, forms and meanings. 【5】They prefer to spend more time reading than listening and speaking in middle school. There is no doubt that they usually ended up with the weakness of their sensibility to pronunciations and tones, which influencing reception and dealing with input information and preventing the improvement of listening comprehension skills. 【6】
Vocabulary is also one of the main difficulties. There are inevitably some colloquial expressions and some Jargons in the listening materials, which students seldom encounter in their daily life.
ⅡBackground information
Background information refers to other knowledge learners should have in order to comprehend meanings of speeches apart from linguistic knowledge, such as social/cultural knowledge, professional knowledge, related schemata and so on. 【7】In listening materials, some information about daily life has an intimate relation with cultural background of English-speaking countries. Sometimes students cannot catch what they have heard not because of their language proficiency but because of lack of the corresponding background information.
ⅢPsychological factors
Many psychological researches have indicated that people’s affections such as self-confidence, anxiety and so on will have a direct influence on the performance of their listening ability.
Most students may become anxious and can hardly concentrate their attention on the listening materials while encountering troubles. Under this situation, students’ psychological actions will be suppressed and their thoughts will become slow, which will exert a negative impact on their listening.
2.2.3 Listening materials
As foreign language learners, Chinese middle school students have little access to authentic English speech, which prevents them from getting familiar with many features of spoken language. In listening teaching class, the contents of the listening materials often lose contact with the reality and some specific situation; some are usually adapted by teachers instead of coming from the authentic and natural language in real life. They are unfavorable to listening teaching and students’ listening ability improvement.
3. Literature reviews
3.1 Research on learning strategies
Since the 1970s, many linguists at home and abroad have given definitions to learning strategies from different aspects (Stern, 1983; Chamot, 1987; Oxford, 1989). Although there hasn’t been a universally admitted definition by SLA researchers and teachers by now, almost everyone agrees to the following definition: learning strategies are means and methods adopted by learners to improve their second language or foreign language levels; they penetrate the whole process of language learning and application; they result from the problems appearing in language activities and serve to solve them; we can find they are flexible and various and influenced by many factors; they can be dominant external acts or recessive psychological acts that can be trained or learned. 【8】
Since the definition given above is quite abstract, to speak more explicitly, learning strategies are actions taken by learners to make their learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, and more transferable to new situations (Oxford 1998:8)
Though we often use listening strategies without realizing their value, they do help us a lot in language learning. Wen Qiufang(1999:112) once stated that any strategies applied appropriately are more likely to spur learners to achieve success.
3.2 Research on listening strategies
Learning strategies can improve learners’ foreign language learning; similarly, listening strategies can be used to facilitate students’ listening learning and then to optimize their learning efficiency. Therefore, learning listening strategies is quite necessary and helpful.
3.2.1 Definition of listening strategies
Listening strategies are considered as “any sets of operations, steps, plans, routines used by the learners to facilitate the obtaining, storage, retrieval and use of information” 【9】(Wenden ＆ Rubin,1978:19). In other words, they are specific measures taken by listeners to make their listening process easier and more successful.
3.2.2 Classification of listening strategies
Since the study of second language listening strategies is based on the theory of language learning strategies, most people hold the opinion that second language listening strategies can also be classified by using O’Malley ＆ Chamots’s (1990:99) three-way division of learning strategies. That is to say, listening strategies can be divided into metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social/affective strategies.
3.2.2.1 Metacognitive strategies
Metacogintive strategies deal with pre-assessment and pre-planning, on-line planning, evaluation and post-evaluation of language learning activities and of language use events. According to O’Malley ＆ Chamots (1990:101), metacognitive strategies involve establishing goals, working out a plan, choosing strategies, self-monitoring, self-evaluation and self-adjustment which are especially essential in listening process. In Vandergrift’s(1999:105) opinion, metacognitive strategies can make learners thoroughly know their listening processes, be qualified for the capacity of foresight and error monitoring and finish reflection, evaluation, correcting mistake and find correct knowledge. 3.2.2.2 Cognitive strategies
Cognitive strategies involve active manipulation of the listening task. Oxford (1990:56) gives the following examples of cognitive strategies use. 【10】
1) Practicing (for example, using formulas and patterns);
2) Receiving and sending messages (for example, focusing on the main idea of a message);
3) Analyzing and reasoning (for example, analyzing expressions);
4) Creating structure for input and output (for example, taking notes).
3.2.2.3 Social/affective strategies
Learning a language is different in many ways from learning most other subjects mainly because of its social and communicative nature. Learning a language involves communicating with other people and therefore requires not only suitable cognitive skills but also certain social and communicative skills.
Social/affective strategies entail cooperative learning, questioning for clarification, and affection control over listening experiences. They can help learners interact with other people and gain control over their emotions, attitudes and motivations.
3.3Importance of listening strategies
Many scholars, through their studies, have found that listening strategies do play a positive role in language learning, especially during the listening process. Wen Qiufang (2002:91) thinks the difference of English listening strategies has a decisive effect on listening results, if other qualifications are at the same level. Maclntyre ＆Noels(1996) believe listening strategies are helpful in understanding and mastering listening processes, as they can reduce learners’ confusion and worries in listening, keep their learning enthusiasm and impetus and improve their learning attitudes and driving forces.
Just as a saying goes “It is better to teach a man how to fish than to give him a fish.’’ What the students need to learn most is the skills that they can use to facilitate their language learning process. Only when they have mastered some strategies can they learn independently and autonomously for further studies. Teachers should be aware of the importance of listening strategies and help students master them.

4 Application of listening strategies to listening teaching in middle school
4.1 An experiment on listening strategy training in a middle school
As mentioned in the previous section, the current English listening teaching problems stem from various reasons. It is commonly admitted that there is no single way for successful listening teaching. But with the vast complexity of listening, a great deal more than just listening to tapes is necessary. What is required for such success is the persistent use of listening strategies, thus the application of listening strategies is extremely important in listening class. There are three stages in listening activities for language learners: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening stages. During each stage, teachers can carry out strategy training for students and stimulate students to consciously adjust their listening strategies in listening.
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