The Effect of Listening Strategy Instruction for Junior High School Students in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Ting-Lu Huang, 黃亭綠
• Other Authors: Chun-Yin Doris Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/69573645011582942090

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 91 === The present study discusses the role of listening strategy instruction for junior high school students in Taiwan by investigating the effect of listening strategy training, the rates of acquisition of four listening strategies, and the training effects on texts (i.e., statements and dialogues), and two tasks (i.e., identification and making response). Two classes of third-year junior high school students participated in the study as the experimental and control groups. Two listening tests were taken from General English Proficiency Tests as the pre-test and the post-test. Before the training, the pre-test was administered to the two groups. Then, the experimental group received specific listening strategy instructions for about nine months, whereas the control group listened to the same materials and completed the same exercises without any strategy training. After the training, a post-test was given to both groups at the same time. In addition, the experimental group had to complete a questionnaire. The overall results show that the listening strategy training facilitated junior high school students’ listening comprehension in that the experimental group made significant after the training and the majority of students in the experimental group reported that they felt the training pleasant and useful. Moreover, they benefit most from scanning during the training, followed by linguistic inferencing, and most of the subjects considered the training of scanning, skimming, and linguistic inferencing useful, but not that of note-taking. Statements were found to be easier texts for junior high school learners to listen to and the subjects benefited significantly more from the strategy training than dialogues did. However, more subjects claimed they had no difficulty in listening to dialogues than to statements. Finally, with respect to the training effects on tasks, identification was found to be an easier task and the subjects benefited more from the strategy training than making responses. Also, they felt less troubled with identification. The present findings suggest that the explicit strategy instruction help enhance students’ listening skills and their listening processes should be emphasized more than their test scores. Moreover, it is said that teachers’ belief will influences students’ learning attitude. Further research may include a larger number of subjects, and the listening tests with a variety of texts and tasks may be chosen to further explore students’ listening strategy uses in. Finally, more listening strategies may be taught to see if the training effects will remain more evident.