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also found there is no consistency between strategy use and proficiency levels; in other words, LP students used strategies related to “good” listeners whereas both HP and MP students sometimes used strategies related to “poor” listeners. The result indicated that strategy use is very complex and highly individualized (Graham et al.
2008). It may not be possible to expect “poor” listeners to improve only through teaching them strategies involving “good” listeners.
In students’ reflection journals, we found that students of the three proficiency levels reflected whether the strategy was suitable for them and tried to choose
strategies that were suitable for them. Moreover, according to what students reported, we also found that students started to find strength and weakness of the strategies and even resorted to a higher level strategy use like grouping and note-taking. In other words, reflection journals helped them raise strategic awareness and moderate their own strategy use at the same time.
Q4: How do students adjust their social and affective sub-strategies in listening after listening strategy instruction?
In social and affective strategies, the reported use of affective strategies exceeded the reported use of social strategies as a whole, and the reported use of both social and affective strategies decreased as LSI proceeded especially in affective strategies.
According to Oxford (1990), social strategies concerning about strategies involving interacting with others while affective strategies relating to strategies dealing with one’s own feelings. In other words, students need time to use social strategies;
however, it was difficult for them to use social strategies in class especially
questioning for clarification because of time constraint in class. In consequence, the reported use of social strategies was less than the reported use of affective strategies.
Regarding to the reported use of social and affective strategies among the three groups, we found that HP group utilized the use of affective strategies the least while
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LP group utilized these strategies the most. This may result from learners’ confidence.
Khaldieh (2000) argued that high levels of language proficiency relates to less anxiety and more confidence, indicating that HP students have more confidence and less anxiety when doing the listening questions whereas LP students have less confidence and more anxiety compared with HP students. Therefore, it was natural for LP students to use more affective strategies to ease their anxiety. Besides, we also found that HP students decreased their reported use of affective strategies obviously as LSI proceeded, indicating that as HP students got more and more used to the listening tests, they became less and less nervous because of their better control of their listening.
Concern about social strategies, however, LP students used the least whereas MP students used the most. This may root in learners’ motivation. Serri, Boroujeni, and Hesabi (2012) noted that motivation influences the choice of strategies. LP students, generally speaking, have less motivation than higher proficiency students; therefore, they may feel troublesome to leave their seats to discuss with their classmates about the answers or asking teachers about the listening task. Consequently, their reported use of social strategies was the least.
Interestingly, the group using social strategies the most is MP group rather than HP group. The reason may concern about different experience in using social strategies.
Almost half of the students (up to five students) in HP group reported that discussion what was not understood in the listening with peers is useless for them. Sample excerpts were as follows:
Because everyone’s answers were different, they insisted on their own answers but did not know the correct answers.
I think looking for the answers in the textbooks or past text sheets is a better way. (S2 HP RJ1)
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It seems that HP students were more eager to look for the correct answers for getting higher grades in the sectional exams, so whether the strategies were useful or not lies in the strategies that could help them get the correct answers. When
discussing with peers, HP students were usually the people understanding the listening content the most, and it was not easy to look for correct answers from MP students or LP students, so they tended to feel they benefited from the social strategies less than their peers; consequently, HP students used social strategies the least.
However, we found that HP students increased their reported use of social strategies as LSI proceeded. In order to shed light on this change, we turned to analyze their reflection journal and found that HP students expanded their reported use of
cooperation from only finding out the answers to asking peers how to listen better in RJ3. Their negative feelings about social strategies were only reported in RJ1 and RJ2.
The ability to advance the use of strategies indicated that HP students are those who are able to deepen and broaden the horizons of their strategies use, and the result is similar to Chen’s (2009) study. One HP student’s change can be an example. At first, this HP student defined the strategy of cooperation shallowly:
Checking answers with peers is useless because not everyone remembered the listening questions. Only some people got a general picture of the questions, but their answers were not surely correct. (S12 HP RJ1)
Discussing answers with peers is useless because you could not discuss answers with peers in the sectional exams.
(S25 HP RJ1)
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However, in RJ3, this student broadened the use of cooperation:
With regard to changes of the reported use of social and affective strategies as a whole, we found that there is a decrease in the reported use of both social and
affective strategies especially in affective strategies and the reason may be that for the lack of explicit affective strategies teaching, students felt affective strategies useless for them as one MP student reported in his RJ2:
However, when further investigating in each group, we found that compared with the other groups, LP group stabilized their reported use of social and affective strategies.
The reason may be that LP students were less good at adjusting and orchestrating strategies (Vandergrift, 2003) especially for the lack of explicit strategy teaching.
Therefore, they may insist in their strategy use as Graham (2008) noted in his study that there is high degree of stability of the strategy use over time without explicit strategy teaching.
Encouraging yourself is useless. If you do not understand the listening text, keeping encouraging yourself wasted your time. It may make your listening interrupted. (S22 MP RJ2)
I think discussing with peers about what I don’t understand in the listening is useless because isn’t discussing with peers about discussing the meaning of vocabulary? But script will be handed out to us latter, so I think there’s no need to discuss with peers.(S16 HP RJ2)
I discuss with peers about how to listen better and how to get the correct answer more easily. (S16 HP RJ3)
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