The Listening Strategies of Japanese High School Students
205M048 K. T.
Listening comprehension is viewed as an active process in cognitive psychology. In this process listeners construct meanings from aural passages and relate what they hear to their existing knowledge. Listening strategy is a physical or mental activity to enhance this process effectively and smoothly. I taught some listening strategies in a listening class. By teaching specific listening strategies in a listening class, I tried to raise students' conscious awareness toward listening strategies and to encourage them to use them consciously. In this paper, I investigated how listening strategy instruction influences the students' conscious use of listening strategies, and explored some of the effects of listening strategy instruction.
In chapter one, I discussed the background of research into listening and learning strategies. First of all, I referred to the history of learning strategy research, the term 'strategy', and to the definitions and characteristics of learning strategies. I then described listening process including listening process within the theory of working memory, the definition of listening strategies, their classifications, listening strategy use at several proficiency levels, and some of the positive effects of listening strategy instruction. Also, I illustrated why I assume listening strategies should be taught and how listening strategies should be taught.
In chapter two, I described how the investigation was conducted. For the investigation, I formulated the following research questions:
- Do the students realize the effect of listening strategies and how do they react to listening strategy instruction?
- How does listening strategy instruction influence their conscious use of listening strategies?
- Does listening strategy instruction lead to a modification in how they listen and their attitudes toward listening?
I gave a listening strategy instruction which lasted from April 13th to October 5th, 2006. The participants in this study are the high school students who took the listening class. I asked the students to fill in a five-scale questionnaire about their conscious use of listening strategies at the beginning of the strategy instruction (questionnaire 1) and to complete the same questionnaire at the end of it (questionnaire 3). The comparison of the two results of these questionnaires was used to verify the change in their conscious strategy use and some of the effects of listening strategy instruction. The students’ strategy-evaluation sheets and questions on questionnaire 3 were also used to see some of the effects of strategy instruction. In addition, the students were required to fill out questionnaire 2 about halfway through the instruction. In questionnaire 2, they were asked if they used the strategies on questionnaire 1 more or less consciously. The data was analyzed for the purpose of this research.
In chapter three, I presented the results and analyzed the data obtained from the experiment.
In chapter four, I discussed the results of the investigation. The results showed the change and increase in the students' conscious use of listening strategies. Furthermore, the study observed some of the effects of listening strategy instruction: a positive attitude toward the listening strategy instruction and listening, greater motivation, self-confidence, and the use of listening strategies they had learned and they had discovered for themselves.
In the final chapter, I suggest that listening strategy instruction is effective to improve students listening skills and that making students' listening process effective is vital in teaching listening. Lastly, I discussed some of the implications for future research.