Listening comprehension strategy instruction: a review of previous studiesx

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC SƯ PHẠM TP HỒ CHÍ MINH 
TẠP CHÍ KHOA HỌC 
HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE
ISSN: 
1859-3100 
KHOA HỌC GIÁO DỤC 
Tập 16, Số 8 (2019): 227-240 
EDUCATION SCIENCE
Vol. 16, No. 8 (2019): 227-240
 Email: tapchikhoahoc@hcmue.edu.vn; Website:  
227 
Research Article 
LISTENING COMPREHENSION STRATEGY INSTRUCTION: 
A REVIEW OF PREVIOUS STUDIESx 
Ngo Thi Thanh Huyen 
Hung Vuong University 
Corresponding author: Ngo Thi Thanh Huyen – Email: ngohuyen2003@yahoo.com 
Received: March 10, 2019; Revised: June 01, 2019; Accepted: July 16, 2019 
ABSTRACT 
The article aims to review empirical studies on the effects of listening strategy instruction on 
the learners’ listening comprehension and their uses of listening strategies. This review is 
particularly interested in studies dealing with types of strategies used by English learners and the 
differences between the learners at the end of the research. The studies to be reviewed are those in 
the world and in Vietnam. Based on the review, some major conclusions and suggestions for further 
study in this field are provided. 
Keywords: listening instruction, listening strategies, listening strategy use. 
1. Introduction 
In spite of receiving minimal concern in the teaching and learning of English as 
Second/ Foreign Language (ESL/ EFL); listening comprehension is one of the most 
important skills in language learning (Bern, 1998; Oxford, 1993). This skill not only affects 
other related academic subjects of the students such as speaking, presentation or interpreting 
in English, but it also has lots of impacts on their professional practice. Being aware of the 
importance of mastering this skill, the author of this study, who is also a teacher, has spent 
much time reviewing literature related to methods to improve her students’ listening skills 
and found that there is a need to train them how to listen effectively (Gramham &Maccaro, 
2008; Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari, 2010). Listening strategy instruction has been widely 
recognized as an effective way in improving learners’ listening proficiency across a range 
of settings (Berne, 2004; Chamot, 1993; Vandergrift, 1997). 
Given the importance of listening in ESL/ EFL learning and teaching, there has been 
a growing body of literature on how listening strategy instruction influences the learners’ 
listening comprehension (Ana, 2010; Naoko, 2000; Yi, 2014). Participants of these studies 
were both ESL and EFL learners at college or high school level in the United States, Japan, 
Cite this article as: Ngo Thi Thanh Huyen (2019). Listening comprehension strategy instruction: A review of 
previous studies. Ho Chi Minh City University of Education Journal of Science, 16(8), 227-240. 
Tạp chí Khoa học Trường ĐHSP TPHCM Tập 16, Số 8 (2019): 227-240 
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Turkey, Thailand, and Vietnam. As suggested by O’Malley and Chamot (1990), explicit 
instruction can be beneficial to the learners by informing them about the purpose and the 
essence of strategies to be used, helping students maintain the strategy use over time and 
transfer the strategies learned into new tasks. 
This paper aims to review what researchers have studied about the effects of listening 
strategy instruction on the learners’ listening comprehension and their strategy uses. It is 
hoped that this review may provide some directions for teaching listening skills and facilitate 
future studies by finding out some gaps. 
2. Concepts related to listening strategy instruction 
2.1. Listening comprehension 
According to various researchers, listening comprehension is viewed as active and 
problem- solving processes in which learners construct meanings from aural passages and 
relate what they hear to existing knowledge (Anderson, 1985; Chamot & Kupper, 1989; 
O’Malley & Rost, 1990; Scarcella & Oxford, 1992). 
Anderson (1985) summarized listening comprehension process by a three-stage model 
called perceptual processing, parsing and utilization. 
In perceptual processing, learners focus their attention on the text and the sounds of 
the text are retained in short-term memory. During this period, the language begins to be 
analyzed and the learners transfer some of the text into meaningful representations. They 
mainly focus on the key words to comprehend the whole text. 
In parsing, learners first understand the words by matching the aural pattern of the 
word with its representation in the declarative knowledge. Segments or chunks of the 
language (words/ phrases) are necessary to decode the meaning. The length of the phrases/ 
segments processed depends on the learners’ knowledge of the language, the topic and the 
speech of the aural texts. 
In utilization process, the learners relate a mental representation of the meaning to 
declarative knowledge. When a new text meaning comes in, declarative knowledge is 
activated. Utilization is the key to comprehend the texts because comprehension happens 
when the knowledge the learners already have well matches with the new knowledge. 
2.2. Learning strategies 
Learning strategies are commonly defined as a thought process or behaviors that 
individuals engage in to comprehend, learn or retain new information (O’Malley& Chamot, 
1990; Oxford, 1990; Rubin, 1987; Wenden, 1983). 
Many researchers agree on the following features of learning strategies: 
- Some learning strategies are observable (e.g. note taking, cooperation), while some 
others cannot be observed (e.g. monitoring, interference) (Abraham & Vann, 1987; 
O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990; Wenden, 1987). 
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- At the early stages, learning strategies may be performed consciously and later 
unconsciously when the strategy application becomes automatic through practice (O’Malley 
& Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990; Wenden, 1987; Rubin, 1987). 
- Learning strategies can be taught because they are amenable to change. The results of 
various studies have shown that the students who practice using strategies process 
information more effectively and appropriately than those who do not use them (O’Malley 
& Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990; Wenden, 1987). 
- Learning strategies can be transferred to new, similar tasks if they are practiced (Jones 
et al., 1987; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990). 
- Learning strategies can be investigated by many research methods such as observation, 
interviews, questionnaires, think- aloud, learners’ journals (Cohen, 1987; O’Malley & 
Chamot, 1990; Wenden, 1987). 
2.3. Learning strategy taxonomy 
Rubin (1975) divided learning strategies into four types: learners’ psychological 
characteristics such as risk- taking and tolerance for ambiguity; learners’ communication 
strategies; learners’ social strategies such as seeking opportunities to use language; learners’ 
cognitive strategies such as guessing and inference. 
Naiman, Frohlich, Stern and Todesco (1978) identified five strategies of a good learner 
which are a) actively involving himself in learning and practice; b) developing an awareness 
of language as a system; c) engaging in real communication; d) monitoring one’s 
interlanguage; e) dealing with the affective demands of language learning. 
Oxford (1990) and O’Malley and Chamot (1990) adopted the information processing 
theory of cognitive psychology by Anderson (1985) which divided long- term memory into 
declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. They divided learning strategies into 
three categories, metacognitive, cognitive and social/ affective strategies. Under these three 
categories of strategies, there are 22 learning strategies (Looking at the Table 1). 
Table 1. Classification of learning strategies by O’Malley & Chamot (1990) 
Three types of learning strategies 
Metacognitive strategies 
Planning; directed attention; selective 
attention; self-management; self-
monitoring; self-evaluation 
Cognitive strategies 
Repetition; resourcing; grouping; note-
taking; deduction/reduction; substitution, 
elaboration; summarization; translation; 
transfer; inferencing 
Social/affective strategies 
Questioning for clarification; cooperation; 
self-task; self-reinforcement 
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3. Previous studies on listening strategy instruction 
3.1. Findings of previous studies 
Various studies have been focusing on investigating the effects of listening strategy 
instruction on the learners’ listening comprehension and most of them were experiment or 
quasi-experiment research. The results of these studies have shown that listening strategy 
training really helps learners perform better in their listening lessons. 
Gramham & Macaro (2008) measured the long-termed effects of strategy instruction 
on both the listening performance and self-efficacy of 68 lower-intermediate learners of 
French in England. The study was implemented in two phases. The first phase was to 
investigate the kinds of difficulties encountered by the students with the help of think-aloud 
procedures. The result of this phase showed that the students rarely used their prior 
knowledge and strategies to listen to the tasks. The pre-intervention investigation of the 
problems and the strategies used by the learners in phase 1 forced them to decide to apply a 
cluster of listening strategies as the intervention for high-scaffolding group and low-
scaffolding group in phase 2. The participants were tested for listening proficiency for each 
phase, using different audio-recordings on the same topic which consisted of a number of 
short passages. In order to investigate the self-efficacy of the learners, an adapted 
questionnaire was administered. 
Overall, the results of the strategy intervention programme revealed that the learners’ 
listening proficiency and their confidence about listening in the treatment groups 
significantly surpassed those in the control groups. In addition, the positive result in listening 
comprehension appeared to be closely linked to changes in the self-efficacy. 
Vandergrift (2003) compared listening comprehension strategies of Canadian French 
students ranging from more-skilled to less-skilled levels. Students were instructed to think- 
aloud while listening to several French texts. Vandergrift found that the more skilled 
listeners used more metacognitive strategies like monitoring or evaluating than the less 
skilled listeners. The less skilled students were found to use more translation strategy as they 
were listening. There were differences in the strategy use between the more proficient 
learners and less proficient ones. 
A mix-method study under the design of a quasi-experiment was conducted by 
Nantikarn (2016) among 161 participants in Thailand to compare the changes in the listening 
comprehension, the strategy use and self-efficacy of the two experimental groups and the 
two control groups. The participants were assigned to two lower-proficiency level groups 
and two intermediate level groups. The study focused on the metacognitive and cognitive 
strategies as the taxonomy of listening strategies by Macaro (2006). Pre-test and post-test, 
Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ) adapted from Vandergrift 
(2006), Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari (2010) and stimulated-recall protocol (interview) were 
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employed as the data collection instruments of the study. The results of the study showed 
that although the self-efficacy of all participants was not improved, the listening 
comprehension of the treatment groups was much higher than that of the control groups 
regardless of their level of proficiency. In addition, the students in the intervention groups 
did use more listening strategies than those in the control groups. The author of this study 
came to conclusion that strategy instruction can improve listening comprehension and 
suggested that the teachers can adopt a strategy based approach to help improve the learners’ 
level of listening comprehension and self-regulated motivation such as self-efficacy. 
There have been lots of studies on metacognitive listening strategies on the EFL 
learners’ listening comprehension and their perceptions of metacognitive awareness. 
One of those was a quasi-experimental designed research was conducted in Iran 
(Maryam & Mohammad, 2014), focusing only on the effects of metacognitive strategies on 
the EFL learners’ listening performance and their metacognitive awareness. Like the ditto 
study, this one employed MALQ questionnaire, IELTS tests as pretest and posttest, and 
interview as the data collecting tools. The participants of the study were 50 students of 
English literature at the state university of Qom, Iran. The metacognitive listening strategies 
applied to the experimental group were adapted from the models proposed by Vandergrift & 
Tafaghodtari (2010). The treatment group, after the experiment, significantly outperformed 
the control group in the posttest. The findings of the questionnaire and interview also proved 
that the metacognitive awareness of the students in the experimental group was much 
improved than that of the control groups. 
In a similar vein, another quasi-experiment study (Khaled, 2012) was carried out in 
Iran in order to investigate the impact of listening strategy instruction on academic lecture 
comprehension among 58 EFL learners. The treatment group received a 14 hours of listening 
strategy training consisting of the presentation, practice, and review of the strategy use while 
the control group received no strategy instruction. The analyzed data showed that the 
participants in the treatment group dramatically outperformed those in the comparison group 
in the listening posttest. The findings of the study shed more light on the effects of listening 
strategy instruction on listening comprehension. 
Additionally, a similar study carried out by Birjandi (2012) to explore the effect of 
metacognitive strategy instruction on the listening performance of 62 EFL university 
students in Iran. After screening the participants, they were assigned into the experimental 
group who received the strategy training following the models proposed by Vandergrift and 
Tafaghodtari (2010) and O’Malley and Chamot (1990) while the comparison group got no 
instruction. The listening test of TOEFL was utilized to measure the listening performance 
of the participants before and after the treatment. The result of the study showed that the 
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gains in listening ability of the intervention groups were higher than those of the comparison 
groups. It can be concluded that listening strategy training helped better the listening ability. 
In another EFL setting, Ross and Rost (1991) conducted an informative two-phase 
listening strategy study with Japanese college students learning English as a foreign 
language. They first identified listening strategies that high-proficiency students used in 
successful video listening, and then taught those strategies to low-proficiency students. Their 
results showed that “specific listening strategies can be taught to learners of all proficiency 
levels” (Ross & Rost, 1991). 
Naoko (2000) applied listening strategy instruction for female EFL students in Japan 
to examine listening strategies which the students frequently used and identify the 
differences in the strategy use between the low and high scorers on a listening test. The 
research also introduced the unfamiliar strategies to the students and evaluated their 
effectiveness from various perspectives. The study consisted of two phases. In the first 
phase, the questionnaire and interview were administered to find out the strategy use of the 
students. The pretest was also used to assign students into control group and treatment group. 
In the second phase, the listening strategy instruction was implemented as the intervention. 
The findings from posttest, questionnaires, guided journals and self-evaluation sheets 
revealed that the listening comprehension ability, strategy use, the transfer and durability of 
the strategies and the student’s attitudes toward the instruction significantly improved. 
Karen (2003) conducted a study among ESL intermediate learners in the United States 
to test the hypothesis that targeted listening strategy instruction in the ESL classroom results 
in improve listening comprehension that can be useful in English language learners’ 
academic content classes. The participants of the study were the high school students who 
were native Spanish and native Albanian speakers immigrating the US with their parents. 
The theoretical framework for the study was based on the cognitive theory and strategy 
research (Anderson, 1983; 1985). The study employed the two pretests to measure the 
students’ bottom-up listening skills and top- down listening skills respectively. The two 
posttests followed the format of the pretests with different information. After receiving the 
treatment of listening strategy instruction sessions, the students were found to improve their 
video listening ability and note- taking ability. The study suggested that listening strategy 
instruction should be a part of the ESL curriculum. 
To add affirmation to the literature of metacognitive strategy training, Abdullah (2010) 
conducted an experiment among 40 beginner students of ESL in Turkey. The primary data 
collection instrument of the study was the pretest and posttest from the test booklet of the 
course book which were similar to the listening activities into which the strategy training 
was embedded. The secondary collecting tool of the research was the MALQ questionnaire 
adapted from that of Vandergrift & Tafaghodtari (2010). CALLA strategy training phases 
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(Robbin, 2000) including preparation, presentation, practice, evaluation and expansion was 
adapted for each listening task. In spite of the lack of the pre-test, the results of the research 
revealed that the experimental group made significant gains over the comparison group. 
In a similar context of ESL, Yi (2014) implemented a quasi-experiment to examine the 
effects of explicit listening strategy instruction on the listening comprehension of 82 ESL 
students. The participants were the immigrating students studying at a community college in 
Northern California (USA). The strategies in the Cognitive Academic Learning Approach 
(CALLA) model by Chamot and O’Malley (1990) was employed to design the lesson plan 
framework including five steps of the study. Besides, the study also used the listening 
strategy taxonomy of Vandergrift (1997) which consisted of three types of strategies namely 
metacognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and socio-affective strategies. A variety of data 
collection instruments including pre-intervention observation, interview, pretest, post-
intervention interview and posttest were used to compare the changes in the listening 
comprehension of the intervention group and comparison group. The analysis of the 
collected data showed that explicit listening strategy instruction improved the strategy use 
of beginning- level ESL students, their listening comprehension performance. Moreover, 
after experiencing the intervention, the students were more aware of the usefulness of 
listening strategies. 
Aiming at investigating the effects of listening strategy instruction on listening 
comprehension, oral proficiency and metacognition on ESL learners, Ana (2010) conducted 
a quasi-experiment using the Minnesota