Abstract:Due to the limitations of economy and geography, long-time ignorance and lack of advanced teaching theories, the current situation of English teaching in rural junior high schools is far from satisfactory. As one of the four basic skills, listening is inevitably important for it acts as the foundation of the other skills—reading, writing, speaking. In recent years, with the prevalence of learning strategy research, people have begun to recognize students as the subject of learning and are paying increasing attention on learning strategies. In order to improve the teaching quality in rural junior high schools, this thesis is to explore how to cultivate the students’ ability of listening comprehension by conducting strategy training. On the basis of theories concerning listening strategies and inspired by existing researches, this thesis mainly focuses on the following questions: Firstly, can students’ listening comprehension be improved by strategy training? Secondly, can students’ strategy awareness be improved by strategy training? Thirdly, how to conduct strategy training effectively? The writer conducted an empirical research in the internship from September to November in 2014. Subjects participating in this study are 84 students from two classes who were taught by the writer. (There were 43 students in one class and 41 students in the other.) In the control group, a traditional teaching method was used while strategy training was conducted in the experimental group. During the experiment, questionnaires, test papers and interviews were adopted as instruments. Questionnaires were used to investigate the students’ current situation of strategy application and overall awareness of listening strategies. Interviews gave guidance to students’ needs. Test papers were analyzed both before and after the training in order to evaluate the effect of the strategy training. The writer carefully chose the listening strategies needed to be trained and incorporated them into the lesson plan for the experimental group. The strategy straining was conducted flexibly. Sometimes explicit strategy training was given through specific tasks, and sometimes the strategies were implicitly embedded into the classroom activities. 

This thesis is composed of 3 chapters. In the first chapter, the writer reviews theories concerning about the definition of listening comprehension, definition of listening strategies and classification of listening strategies and different strategy training models. Chapter 2 is concerned about the research design. In this chapter, the author firstly states the research purpose and then introduces the subjects, instruments, procedures of the experiment. In Chapter 3, the results of this study are analyzed and discussed. Besides, teaching implications and suggestions are mentioned in this chapter.

Key Words: Listening comprehension Listening strategy Strategy training 

Contents

Abstract

摘要

Introduction-7

Ⅰ Literature Review-9

1.1 Listening Comprehension-9

1.2 Related Researches on Learning Strategies and Listening Strategies-10

1.3 Related Researches on Strategy Training-12

Ⅱ Methodology-13

2.1 Research Questions-13

2.2 Subjects-13

2.3 Instruments-14

2.3.1 Test papers-14

2.3.2 Listening Material-14

2.3.3 Interview-14

2.3.4 Questionnaires-14

2.4 Procedures-15

2.4 .1 Raise students’ strategy awareness-16

2.4 .2 Training of selective attention-16

2.4 .3 Training of predicting-17

2.4 .4 Fostering students’ note-taking ability-19

2.4 .5 Training of elaboration-20

2.4 .6 Promoting students’ self-evaluation-21

Ⅲ Results and analysis-21

3.1 The effect of listening strategy training on listening proficiency-21

3.2 The effect of listening strategy training on the awareness of strategy use-22

3.3 Teaching implications-23

Conclusion-25

Appendix A-26

Appendix B-26

Appendix C-28

Appendix D-29

Bibliography-30

Acknowledgments-32