Investigating the Relationship between Listening Comprehension Strategies Use and Listening Comprehension Levels

Abstract

This research work aims at investigating the relationship between the use of listening comprehension strategies and students’ comprehension levels. It is based on the hypothesis that if second year students of English at the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia use listening comprehension strategies while listening their comprehension levels will be higher. To test this hypothesis two research tools were used, namely a questionnaire and a listening comprehension test. The questionnaire and the listening test were administered to students of English at the University of Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia, Jijel. The results obtained have shown that student who reported the use of metacognitive listening comprehension strategies (planning, monitoring and evaluation) and some cognitive strategies (inferencing, elaboration, summarization, note-taking and substitution) got high scores in the listening test. Accordingly, these results revealed that there were a significant correlation between metacognitive and cognitive listening comprehension strategies and listening comprehension levels. Finally, the study points out to the necessity of exposing students to listening comprehension strategies training first to help them with the difficulty of listening skill and second to avoid the use of ineffective strategies like mental translation strategy