Chapter1 Introduction
1.1Background of the Study
For Chinese, English is the major resource for connecting to the internationalinformation overseas. In particular with China’s entry to the WTO, popularizingEnglish is conducive to our nation’s globalization and comprehensive development.Therefore, the Ministry of Education sets English subject as one of the most importantbasic subjects in China and provides a succession of education focusing on fosteringstudents’ ability in listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating from primaryschool to postgraduate stages. However, in China, a non-native English speakingcountry, majority of learners who study English as a second language have missed thecritical period for language acquisition. Although undergraduate students have learnedEnglish for more than 10 years, they still cannot study and apply English as naturallyas mother tongue. Moreover, CET-4 and CET-6 are regarded as the biggest nightmareby undergraduate students who are dread of the difficulty of each section, especiallylistening comprehension. On December 14, 2013, the day for CET-4 and CET-6,SinaWeibo published a topic concerning that more than 40 percent examinees handedin an unanswered listening paper.Krashen’ Input Theory pointed out that language mainly depends on listeningand reading. According to an American statistics list, in the use of practically sociallanguage, listening occupied 45%, speaking did 30%, reading 16% and writing 9%.So in the four basic skills, listening is placed first. Meanwhile, throughout the historyof Chinese education, listening is keeping being regarded as the toughest section sothat students feel frustrated to listening. Since 1990s, the learning strategy for Englishlistening has gotten wide research abroad. In China, for satisfying the listeningrequirements of CET-4 and CET-6, relevant researches began to emerge and expandedquickly.
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1.2The Research Problem of the Study
This research aims to find out how to smoothly fulfill the transition of learningstrategy in listening comprehension from CET-4 to CET-6 and what suggestions canbe put forward to help students successfully overcome the difficulty during thetransition between CET-4 and CET-6 listening comprehension from the perspective ofinterior learning strategy. Through this research, the emphasis will be expected to shiftfrom exam skills of CET-4 or CET-6 to the transition of interior factors of learnersthemselves between CET-4 and CET-6. In addition, based on an empiricalinvestigation on the listening learning strategy use, the following sub-questions can beanswered: the reasons why many students who have passed CET-4, but hardly passCET-6; the differences and connections of the learning strategy between CET-4listening comprehension and CET-6 listening comprehension; the influences ofdistinctive learning strategies on the ultimate listening scores of CET-4 and CET-6and which learning strategy has the most obvious differences in the transition betweenCET-4 and CET-6.
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Chapter2 Literature Review
2.1 Listening Comprehension
Listening is the vital channel that connects and improves speaking, reading andwriting proficiency in the process of language acquisition.O’Malley and Chamot(1989) state that listening comprehension is an active andconscious process in which listeners process aural information from the context theyheard and background knowledge they ever used. Larry Vandergrift(1997) claims that“listening comprehension is anything but a passive activity. It is a complex, activepractice in which the listener must discriminate between sounds, understandvocabulary and grammatical structure, interpret stress and intonation, retain what wasgathered in all of the above, and interpret it with the immediate as well as the largersocio-cultural content of the utterance”. Richard(1983) reveals the nature of listeningcomprehension from the aspects of semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics,cognitive science and discourse analysis. Brown & Yule (1983) think that listening isthe process for absorbing and understanding. Meanwhile, listeners try to use someskills to process and interpret the sentence while listening with relevant experience.Celce-Murcia points out that listening process is both “top-down” and “bottom up”aspects (Rubin, 1998).Therefore, teaching listening comprehension is not only to teach students fromthe perspective of listening skills, but also from that of text linguistics. In reality,listening belongs to a kind of cognitive activity that can process and interpret theinformation heard. Listening implies some conscious attending to the message ofwhat is said (Dixon,1991).Boyle(1984) classifies the factors that impact EFL( English as foreign language)listening comprehension in three aspects based on the survey of Chinese teachers andstudents.
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2.2 Listening Learning Strategy
By reading the previous studies on listening learning strategy, it can beconcluded that this research in foreign countries can be traced to 1980’s. Rubin(1975)finds that language learning strategies are techniques using at the time of acquiringknowledge. In 1978, Weden and Rubin narrowed down research scope and definedlistening learning strategy as a series of action, processor taken for obtaining, storing,regaining and applying information. O'Malley and Chamot(1990) explain that it’s forinpiduals to help themselves comprehend, learn or store some special idea orbehaviors. They also think that the research on listening strategy is the extension ofthe investigation on learning strategy (O'Malley and Chamot, 2001). According toEllis (1999), listening comprehension strategy is the particular approach that learnersusually use to improve their listening comprehension ability. It can both be mentaland behavioral, but it’s typically problem-oriented. When listeners face listeningproblems such as being confused to the listening materials, they can take certainlistening comprehension strategies to help themselves to process materials. And theycan be aware what strategies they are using. From discussed above, it’s anything buthard to find that listening comprehension strategy must claim the following elements:firstly, it’s a kind of learning strategies; secondly, it’s the learning strategy on listeningcomprehension which aims at help learners study and improve listening; thirdly, it canbe used at any time of studying process. XuFang(2011) points that listeningcomprehension strategies include listening mental regulation strategy, contentprediction strategy, key word strategy, comprehensive listening strategy, skill strategyand so on in her master graduation thesis.
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Chapter3Methodology...............16
3.1 Research Questions......16
3.2 Research Method.........16
3.3 Research Design ..........17
3.3.1 Participant........17
3.3.2 Instrument........17
3.4 Data Collection andAnalysis.......18
Chapter4 Results and Discussions......20
4.1 The Examined Language Skills and Requirements..........20
4.2 TheAnalysis on the Most Difficult Part in Listening Comprehension for Students....21
4.3 The Overall Condition on Listening Learning Strategies Use ofAll Participants.......22
4.4 The Total Condition of Listening Learning Strategy Use.......23
4.5 The Comparison of Metacognitive Strategy Use.........24
4.6 The Comparison of Cognitive Strategy Use ........29
4.7 The Comparison of Social/affective Strategy Use.......32
Chapter5 Conclusion...........35
5.1 The Findings of This Research ....35
5.2 Suggestions..........37
5.3The limitations of This Research..........43
Chapter4 Results and Discussions
4.1 The Examined Language Skills and Requirements of CET-4And CET-6 Listening Comprehension
The part of listening comprehension in CET-4 requires students to achieve theaverage level of Teaching Requirements, which asks students to meet the requirementsof being able to follow teachers’ instruction in English, understand dailycommunication and lectures of general topics and catch Special English programs.And the speed of listening materials is about 130 words per minute. In the process oflistening to materials, students should grasp the main ideas, catch the important pointsand make use of basic listening skills to help process what they are listening to.CET-6 listening comprehension clearly points out that students should achievehigher level than CET-4. By and large, CET-6 requires students to comprehend thediscourses and lectures gave by the people from English countries, grasp the radio orTV programs of long or familiar topics at home and catch the main ideas, importantpoints and relevant details of listening materials with the speed of 150 words perminute. Moreover, CET-6 also needs students to grasp the specialized courses broughtup by foreign teachers or experts.
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Conclusion
This chapter will take the above findings into conclusion, and propose somesuggestions on the basis of those findings. At last, the author will talk about somelimitations. This thesis does a research on the transition on listening learning strategybetween CET-4 and CET-6 by investigating the differences on listening learningstrategy use between the students on CET-4 level and those on CET-6 level. Thefindings in this research are concluded as follows:
1）For both the students only passed CET-4 and those on CET-6 level, passagecomprehension is the most difficult part in CET-4 and CET-6 listening. Besidespassage comprehension, there are respective 25% of participants choosing longdialogue and gap filling. Taking into the difficulty arrangement of each part intoconsideration, this result for investigation is in accordance with the characteristics oflistening comprehension in CET-4 and CET-6. So both CET-4 group and CET-6 grouphave good acquaintance with question types and their characteristics.
2) In the process of listening learning of CET-4 or CET-6, the students with atleast CET-4 level can use perse listening learning strategy. But the total condition ofuse frequency is on medium level. Among the three kinds of listening learningstrategies, the use frequency of cognitive strategy is the highest one, that ofmetacognitive strategy ranks the second place, and that of social/affective strategy isthe lowest.
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References (omitted)