A strategy based instruction for teaching listening skills to fourth graders at fisher kids bilingual school

Abstract

This study sought to determine to what extent is strategy-based instruction useful for improving 25 fourth graders’ listening skills at Fisher Kids Bilingual School. Bearing in mind the results obtained in the learning needs analysis applied to students at the beginning of the intervention as well as certain negative aspects that were observed in the methodology offered by the textbook for the development of this skill, a set of listening activities were designed based on the development of making notes, inferring and keywords strategies. To achieve this purpose, the students were trained for 6 weeks following the strategy based instruction model proposed by O "Malley and Chamot" s (1990), in order to help them to be more aware of their learning and able to apply different strategies that facilitate the understanding of the information. The findings indicated the effectiveness of the use of those strategies not only contribute to the improvement of students’ performance in listening skills, but also offer to teacher the possibility to adopt and adapt new approaches, strategies and teaching models that offer students more appropriate alternatives to learn and enhance their performance in listening skills. Key words: Strategy Based Instruction, listening skill, comprehension, metacognitive.