英语本科毕业论文-How to Teach Listening in the Senior Middle School.doc

长江师范学院本科毕业论文I. IntroductionLanguage is the tool which people use to communicate with each other. Learning, speaking, reading and writing are the fundamental skills in English listening.1In native language study, people seem to automatically know “how to listen” and “what they are listening for”. But for English learners, listening is very challenging. At present, the teaching of listening is considered one of the most important teaching courses. Listening greatly affects communicative ability. For this reason, it is necessary for students to break through the obstacles to the listening and to improve their abilities. In recent years, theories on the teaching of listening have been put forward and the focus of attention has shifted from the teacher, who has tended to be the center of the class, to the students. Listening and speaking are the key features of English classes. English teachers should devote to the reforms of teaching systems and adopt suitable teaching methods so that they could improve the quality of listening teaching. In this thesis, some issues related to improving senior students listening ability in Chinese middle school classrooms are to be discussed. II. The Reasons and the Goal of Teaching Listening A. The Reasons of Teaching ListeningNowadays, students are exposed to different varieties of English, for example, British English, American English, Australian English, and Indian English and so on. In British English, there are many different dialects and accents. The differences are not only in pronunciation but also in grammar. “Teaching listening can help students to acquire language subconsciously even if teachers do not draw attention to its special features. Exposure to language is a fundamental requirement for anyone who wants to learn it. Listening to the tapes provides such exposure.”2 Students get vital information not only about grammar and vocabulary but also about pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, pitch and tense. The more students listen to, the better their listening abilities are. In English teaching, first they listen to all kinds of sounds around them, and imitate the sounds, and then they begin to speak. From this point we can see that listening is very important for improving speaking ability. We can say that there will be no English improving without listening. So the teachers must try their best to improve the students listening ability. B. The Goal of Teaching ListeningListening is the most fundamental and the most important language skill. We listen to English songs, and watch TV or movies in English. In conversation or interviews with foreigners, we first listen to them before we make any appropriate response. Without good listening skills in English, we would have great difficulty in communicating with native speakers, and lack of training result in “deaf and dumb”. We will have a quick understanding of what English people are saying, and then we will communicate better. New English course books in middle school co-edited by publishers at home and abroad, heralded a new age in Chinas secondary English teaching. More and more attention has been paid to an all-round development of the four basic language skills, especially to the development of listening skill, which used to be neglected in most English classes in China.According to new Standard of English Curriculum: teaching English in the senior middle school is to help students foster the simon-pure pronunciation, to strengthen their listening level.” Teaching listening is not only part of the teaching context but also an important means to organize all the procedures in class. Throughout the whole teaching process, we develop students listening skills in the hope that they can understand the association between the sound and the grammar structures, and that students will be able to recognize, discriminate and comprehend the words and sentences.In a word, in listening classroom, the teachers should emphasize the ability of language communication, the listening comprehension is placed in the first place. For example, when you talk to someone, first of all you should understand what he or she is talk about. So todays listening teaching in classroom is not only to teach for listening, but also let student know some background of the listening material. The student may be easier to improve their listening ability.III. The Reasons of Students Poor Listening Learning language is in order to communicate. Of the four language skills many students feel that listening are the most difficult. Students, who even be good at reading and writing, have knowledge of listening. What are the reasons for this situation caused? A. Teaching FactorIn traditional teaching, students just listen to tapes with earphones, and then answer listening comprehension questions by saying the chosen answer A, B, C, or D. The teacher may not prepare his lesson well or no control over the speed of the input the meaning of the material heard.If the listening material contains some new words, new sentence patterns or new grammatical points, it is very difficult for non-native learners to catch. What is more, there is much assimilation, linking, weakening or elision, and, sometimes movement of stress or change in the flow of language. Producing suitable discourse, some of the discourse is too difficult to the same level students. And the materials should not too long. When the teacher chooses the listening material, he/she should know what material is sit for students.There exists another problem in listening classroom. Students listening comprehension is limited by the traditional teaching methods and unpopular teaching equipment. Especially some teachers always use mother tongue as a medium for teaching in English classes, stress the grammar to the neglect of training of communicative ability. It gets the students into dull, and directly influences the developing of listening and speaking.B. Students Factor 1. Linguistic Obstacles Listening is regarded as the most difficult skill to acquire. Many students complain that they lack the necessary equipment, such as tape players, VCRs, VCDs, and computers; they lack real-life situation where native speakers are talking, and so on. Their complaints sound reasonable, but even if they are provided with necessary equipment; learners will have many other problems that hinder their listening comprehension. To students, Linguistic obstacles involve pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, Cross-culture and speech obstacles.Pronunciation leads to difficulty in listening because the listener is not familiar with word, stress, sentence stress, rhythm, intonation, redundancy and “noise”, when I as a practice English teacher in a Middle senior school .I found that my students actually did not perceive certain English sounds with any accuracy because these did not exist in their own language. The sound / as is “thank” for example does not exist in Chinese. Some of students do not know normal pronunciation from the beginning of the study. Little by little they can not distinguish some phonemes especially from some words with similar pronunciation such as sheep-ship, house-horse. The pronunciation of English words with is divided into two categories: strong form and weak form. Strong form means basic pronunciation. One word has one strong form. Weak form means weak pronunciation in different situations. One word may have several weak forms. If the students do not know the change of the pronunciation they will face difficulties in listening comprehension.Vocabulary and grammar No doubt it is difficult for students in senior middle school to understand the material without certain in vocabulary and sensitivity to grammar in a question 35% students think that their listening ability poor due to not knowing the words meaning and grammatical structures. Lack of the knowledge also can cause students not to understand the listen material. Although some students process quite good ability in listening they still have problems in listening because of cross-cultural conflicts. They know little about the foreign cultural. Such as: ideology, life style, values, religion, habits, interests, etc. So they find it hard to understand what is said even though they are not new words. When students learn English as a target language they have to know something about English-speaking countries, histories, literature, living style, traditions, festivals, customs and so forth. If not they will face difficulty when listening. For example if the students do not know why the weather always becomes the topic at the beginning of the conversation, they can not really understand the conversation and they may get confused. They sometimes ask foreigners questions such as “where are you going?” and so on, which are called privacy. If the students do not know the differences, they will get confused when listening to related contents.2. Non-verbal ObstaclesPsychological obstacles-We know that when students are in the state of nervousness and anxiety listening comprehension can be influenced. Tapes go at the same speed for everybody. The students can not flick to previous paragraph; they have to go with the speed of the utterances they are listening to. So many students experience the feeing of panic during listening activities. If they fail to recognize a word or phrase they do not know, they stop to think about it. They often miss the following part of the material and soon lag behind in terms of comprehension. Listening seems to be very difficult though it is easy for them to understand, students are not concentrated their mind because they are nervous and uncertain. Moreover, they are slow in response because of lack of practice. Many students hardly have any opportunity to hear English spoken, for their English classes are conducted in Chinese. Finally, students might have to deal simultaneously with another task while listening, such as note-taking or operating equipment while listening to passage.Listening habits influence the effects of listening, which another non-verbal obstacle in students is listening. While most students are listening to a dialogue, paragraph or story, if they fail to recognize a word or phrase they havent understood, they often stop to think about it, but miss other important points or often miss the next part of the tape, and then the listening comprehension may be influenced. Unlike reading, listeners cannot go back to previous paragraph; they have no chance to think it over. On the contrary, they have to go with the speed of voices they are listening to.IV. SolutionsEnglish teachers should pay more attention to the obstacles mentioned above in English classes, so that they can help the students to overcome the obstacles. The students can get better in English listening. For the obstacles, there are some solutions.A. To Enlarge Students Vocabulary by Extensive ReadingVocabulary is important for listening. You do not the meaning of vocabulary, you can do nothing. Vocabulary is one of the main reasons which interfere in listening comprehension, which have been talked above. In order to train the students listening ability, the teacher gets the students to make up dialogues, paragraphs or stories with these words the students have just learnt. And then speak in English again and again. The aim to enlarge vocabulary by reading is to train four kinds of abilitieslistening, speaking, reading and writing. On the other hand, by extensive reading, it may make the students know much more background knowledge about the American or British cultures so that they can improve their listening comprehension.B. To Use Strategies in Training Listening Comprehension Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input. 1. Top-down Strategies“Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next.”3 A listener can infer the message t phoneme, syllable, word, sentence or paragraph. This method concentrates on words, for instance, key words, or negative words: rarely, hardly, seldom, beyond, unless, out of question, couldnt agree more, not in the least, etc. or on signifiers such as when, where, who, what, and how, or on the topic sentence to guess the meaning. For example: A: The music and the flowers are lovely. B: Yes, I hope that the food is good. Q: Where did this conversation most probable take place?a: At the customs. b: At a restaurant.c: At a bank d: On the phone.Once the listener hears the word “food”, he will get the right answer. However, the disadvantage of the method is that the listener just concentrates on words rather than on the whole passage, thus affecting comprehension the theme of the whole. A listener can infer the message from the whole to a part form emphasizing the context. This method centers on global meaning, ignoring the concrete words. Evidence shows that when the listener fails to know some important words, he tends to use this method. Top-down strategies include: listening for the main idea; predicting; drawing inferences; summarizing.When listening, a number of students catch s a single word or sentence by chance, and pay attention to the meaning of those words, but miss the important point. Students sometimes feel that most words or sentences can be understood. However, they have some difficulty in catching the main idea of listening task. If we want to overcome it, we must pay attention to logical relations between the sentences and try to catch the main words and sentences by more practice to learn to summarize.Prediction is difficult for foreign-language learner for various reasons. Intonation, and stress patterns play an important part in supplying ground for certain kinds of expectations. However, must prediction do not depend on such subtleties but on more obvious choice of vocabulary or grammar? For example, the use of “but” or “however” makes us expect something contrasting with or opposing why went before. In short, a learner who has a reasonable grasp of the pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar of the foreign language may often he expect to make the same prediction of what is to follow as a native speaker aided only by skills he carries over some encouragement and practice to take dull advantage of these skills in the context of new language.2. Bottom-up strategies“Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning. Bottom-up strategies include: listening for specific details; recognizing cognation; recognizing word-order patterns; conclusion.”4 it is helpful to provide a task for students to do while they are listening. This gives them a reason to listen teaching; the teacher may choose any kind of task to do, taking into account students levels in English, the teaching and the teaching facilities.3. Metacognitive StrategiesThis is a way to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening. They plan by deciding which listening strategies will serve best in a particular situation. They monitor their comprehension and the effectiveness of the selected strategies. They evaluate by determining whether they have achieved their listening comprehension goals and whether the combination of listening strategies selected was an effective one. C. To Balance Extensive Listening and Intensive ListeningExtensive listening can let the student hear vocabulary items and structures which areas yet unfamiliar to him, as part of language which is at his level of understanding. In this way the student becomes familiar with forms which will shortly become teaching points in a language lesson. Story telling, especially appalling to younger age groups, is an example of extensive listening and often includes a large amount of unknown words and some untaught structures.5 Comprehension is not normally very difficult since the interest of the story holds the attention and familiarity with a great amount of the language is enough to provide a lot of explanation of the unknown material. However, “Intensive listening which is also called Analytic listening is concerned, in a more controlled way, with just one or two specific points.”6 Intensive listening for details can also be added to extensive listening after a general understanding of the listening passage to activate the students thinking and stimulate their listening interest and attention.D. To Use Body LanguageThe Greek philosopher Epictetus ever wittily said: “Nature has given man one tongue and two ears that he may hear twice as much as he speaks.”7 From the saying we can learn how important the listening is in our daily life. To understand others is a basic purpose in English teaching, and teachers often train the students listening accordingly. In this process, if the body language is used, the effect will be better. When beginning a new lesson, the teacher narrates the story outline in English. The body language may help. For example, a teacher can stretch his arms slowly when he says She is in a very big room; he can open his eyes widely with mouth opened when he says She is so beautiful a lady. As a result, the students will have such an impression: She is very beautiful indeed; a teacher who imitates the crying or the movement of the animals under the premise of teaching order will surely achieve