A Study of the English Listening Comprehension Strategies Used by Female and Male Senior Secondary School Students in Edo State

Abstract

One of the aims of this study was to find out the English listening comprehension strategies used by Female and Male Senior Secondary School Students in Edo State. From a population of four thousand eight hundred and fifty four (4854) Senior Secondary 1 students in public schools, a total of four hundred and forty-two (442) students constituted the sample size drawn through the stratified sampling and simple random techniques from four (4) sampled schools (Two All-girls and Two All-boys Schools). One instrument titled Listening Comprehension Strategy Questionnaire (LCSQ) adopted from Oxford (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) was used to collect the data for the study. The data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and t-test for independent sample. Results indicated that among the six strategy categories, Metacognitive strategies had the highest mean for both sexes. The Affective strategies had the lowest mean for the Males, while the Memory strategies had the least mean for the Females.  It was also found that there is no significant difference between the English listening strategies used by Female and Male Senior Secondary School Students. It is recommended among others that teachers should engage Female students in tasks that will require more of their use of the Memory strategies and Male students tasks that will require more of their use of the Affective strategies.

Keywords: Female, Male, Senior Secondary, Meta-cognitive strategies, Memory strategies, Affective strategies.