英语本科毕业论文-How to improve senior high school students’ listening Comprehension.doc

本科毕业论文（设计）目录Abstract - 1摘要 - 1. Introduction - 2. Literature Review- 21. Research in teaching Bottom-up model2. Research in selecting and using listening activities.The factors influencing students listening-4 1. Main factors of teachers1.1 Being lack of authentic materials and context1.2 Lacking right training skills 1.3 Correcting mistakes all the time 1.4 Listening cant be taught separately 2. Main factors of students 2.1 Pronunciation, intonation and stress2.2 The emotional factors 2.3 To be absent-minded. Specific methods to improve students listening ability -71. Listening activities in the classroom1.1 Pre-listening activities1.2 While-listening activities1.3 Post-listening activities2. Specific strategies students do. Conclusion -10Bibliography -12How to improve senior high school students listening ComprehensionAbstractAs we all know, the function of a language is to communicate with each other. Listening, one of the four basic abilities is a significant path to communicate with each other. And it is also considered as one of the most difficulties for students to conquer. Listening is so important that more and more English teachers have become concerned about developing students listening ability. This paper gives a survey of factors influencing students listening and then discusses students listening improving strategies and teachers classroom teaching methods. Through the joint effort of students and teachers, students listening ability will be improved. Keywords:listeningstrategyfactors摘 要众所周知，语言就是为了交流。在四项基本技能中，听力是人们相互交流的重要途径。而且，它也是学生学习最大的障碍。所以，越来越多的教师开始注重培养学生的听力。本论文介绍了影响听力的主要因素，并具体探讨了学生提高听力的方法和老师教授听力的课堂教学法，以便通过师生的共同努力，最终达到提高学生听力的目的。【关键词】听力策略因素I. IntroductionFour basic skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing, are acquired in a certain sequence. Listening lays a solid foundation for developing other skills and is probably the least explicit of the four language skills. Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speakers accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary and grasping his meaning. Foreign language learners often complain that listening is one of the most difficult skills to acquire. Listening is influenced by a numbers of reasons that have their sources inside and outside the head.These include motivation, purpose, fatigue, prejudice and proficiency of the target language.When listening, listeners follow the speaker, thinking about what the speaker is saying and what is going on in the mind of the speaker.In addition, learners should have the knowledge of phonetics, vocabulary and grammar. Many learners are afraid of listening, viewing it as more difficult than other skills and even neglect listening. It is a long time work for learners to improve their listening ability. How can we manage it? This is the very subject I am to cope with.II. Literature Review1. Research in teaching Bottom-up modelIt is not uncommon that two approaches are frequently used to describe different processes of listening. They are the bottom-up model and the top-down model. Bottom-up listening, namely bottom-up processing, refers to a process by which sounds are used to build up increasing larger units of information, such as words, clauses, and sentences before the aural input is understood. Listeners use this process when they construct meaning by accretion, gradually combining units of meaning from the phoneme-level up to discourse-level features. Students, particularly those with years of classroom English but little experience in really using the language try to listen from bottom-up. They attempt to piece the meaning together, word by word. It is easy withbottom-up processing. Students have to wrestle each meaning of individual part in a foreign language before they could make sense of it. This process is an ineffective way to listen since it takes too long. While the listeners are still trying to make sense of what has been said, the speaker keeps going. The listeners then got lost. Although their processing strategy is negative, students do gain some strength from their years of English learning and most have a relatively large. They also often have a solid receptive knowledge of English grammar. In the case of advanced listeners, the bottom-up process is largely automotive. In other words, they dont need to spend time on matching sequences of sound with written words.However, listeners role is reduced to that of passively receiving and storing audio in-put, not unlike a recording device. As a result, that listeners do not rely on the text alone for comprehension is now an established fact. Research has shown that listeners use background knowledge (schema) to analyze, interpret and store information.In the recent years, there is a tendency to overlook bottom-up processing as many view top-down processing as a superior strategy. In fact, listening involves both bottom-up processing-recognizing sounds of words, phrases or structures and top-down processing-referring meaning from broad contextual clues and background knowledge. Comprehension is the result of integration of the information conveyed by the text with information and concepts already known by the listener. In other words, the two processes are mutually dependent. To catch the meaning of each individual word when one is processing English slowly. However, it is very difficult to understand the overall meaning of the passage. While listening 2. Research in selecting and using listening activitiesThere isnt enough variety of types of listening tasks in the most textbooks, so the teachers need to design their own tasks to make the class interesting. Variety is very important. Not only does it help student remain interested and motivated to learn, but it also provides practice in many types of listening situations learners will encounter in real life.Oxford summarizes the following principles for selecting and using listening activities:(1) The listening activities must have a real, communicative purpose.(2) The activity had better use authentic language without significantly slower or simpler speech than would normally be used in everyday life (3) The listening activity must offer content which is personally interesting and motivating to learners(4) The listening activity must offer many environmental clues to meaning, just as in real life listening.(5) It is wonderful for students to select the listening materials corresponding to students learning level, so that they will actively collaborate with teachers and the class will go on smoothly.(6) The classroom climate surrounding the listening activity must be non-threatening and positive, and teachers had better use simple affective strategies to reduce anxiety if the materials are present before or during the listening activity.To conclude, many published textbooks as well as the teaching of listening in classrooms have tended to focus on doing listening tests rather than teaching something that might improve students listening performance. Only in this way, does the listening materials test the students level of comprehension and train the students how to listen or how to cultivate effective listening strategies.III. The Factors Influencing Students Listening1. Main factors of teachers1.1 Being lack of authentic materials and contextThe reason why students listening is poor can be quite complicated. However, one major reason is that most listening materials, passages or dialogues are read by native speakers or some Chinese whose pronunciation is good. Most learners pronunciation has a long distance from the native, which makes it more difficult or even impossible to make sense of what they hear, as the speakers pronunciation and the listeners are completely different, how can one understand the other? Some determined listeners would try their best to make their pronunciation sufficiently articulate and imitate certain speed and intonations which is prescribed in the syllabus. That teaching pronunciation is not sufficiently acknowledged in listening classroom adds to the hindrance of listening comprehension.1.2. Lacking right training skillsWhen training listening, teachers are just tape-recorder players. Although some teachers have already known the importance of English listening and they try to do a lot to improve students listening, their effort is vain. Without confidence, these students shut their ears to listening first and then keep a distance from English in the end. This is just because they lack right training skills. When training listening, teachers have been providing listening materials, listening to them several times and choosing the answer for a long time, which leads to students being fed up with listening. It is efficient for teachers to take advantage of competitive mechanism to activate students interest.1.3. Correcting mistakes all the timeSome teachers are angry with students mistakes in English, so they correct their mistakes and criticize the mistakes all the time. Therefore, students lose their interest in English learning or complain about the teacher. Some students even are determined to give up listening. It is unnecessary for teachers to correct students mistakes continually. Before correction, it is an efficient way to encourage students to formulate their judgment on whether it is a mistake, discuss it, or analyze the cause of the mistake.1.4. Listening cant be taught separately Students have few chances to speak in listening class though speaking is closely related to listening. Thus, although students could understand the listening materials, they would probably lose themselves in the real communicative situations such asconversations, movies or talking with the natives in real life. In a word, listening is often connected with speaking. Wed better encourage all the students to speak in class to create a chance for them to listen by all means. Make sure the students listen to and speak English as much as possible not only in class but also out of class. They can hold “English Corner, Reading and Lecture Comprehension and so on, which make students be interested in English. In the meantime, the more students practice speaking,the better their listening is.2. Main factors of students 2.1 Pronunciation, intonation and stressA famous educator has ever said as long as you can pronounce correctly, your audition will get a huge progress in a day.Different speakers produce the same sounds in different ways, e.g. different dialects, accents, pronunciations, rhythms, intonations and stresses. It is impossible for a learner to develop listening without good distinguish of pronunciation. Intonation means the rise and fall of the pitch change of the voice, which is an important element of speech. Furthermore, the stress in a sentence also can express different meanings. However, most Chinese learners have difficulty in Pronunciation, intonation and stress.2.2. The emotional factors When beginning a listening class, some students will be nervous, anxious and depressed. The process of their mental speech activity will be in a restrictive condition. It is difficult for students to develop the normal listening level. One reason for students anxiety is that there is not enough variety in the materials that they listen to. So the more they wont listen, the less will enter the brain. It is efficient for learners to listen to lessons or lectures given in English, television or movies in English and radio news in English, only in this way can they overcome the anxiety.2.3 To be absent-mindedDuring listening, students cant control themselves in listening class. It is not uncommon thing that student cant form a mental representation from words heard. Hence, they tend to think something else. As a result, they cant keep up with the speed of the speaker; even they cant help giving up listening. There is one way to cope with the situation. In teachers spare time, he should pay more attention to the students, especially to the failing students. When the students are absent-minded, teachers can provide eye contact and body gesture to focus their mind to learn the lesson.IV. Specific Methods to Improve Students Listening Ability1. Listening activities in the classroom1.1 pre-listening activities1.1.1 PredictingPre-listening activities are to prepare listeners for what they are going to hear, just as we are usually prepared in real life to help students concentrate on listening for the lesson. Predicting, setting the scene, listening for the gist and listening for specific information constitute the pre-listening activities.Prediction is regarded by many researchers as one of the most powerful factors in comprehension. Therefore, a good listener is a good predictor. By helping our students become better predictors, we are helping them become better listeners. Prediction also involves asking questions and answering them. According to Fisher and Terry, active comprehension is process of generating questions while reading and searching for answers to them. Questioning helps to establish the purpose and causes the listener to interact with the speech.1.1.2 Setting the sceneAnother type of pre-listening activity is to set the scene for students , such as, picture, video, TV etc. listening to passages in the classroom can be more difficult than listening in real life because of the lack of context. So the teacher can help provide the background information to activate learners schema or illustrate the picture to help students understand the main idea.1.1.3 Listening for the gistThis type of pre-listening activity is listening for the gist, which is similar to the concept of skimming a passage in reading. This stage is necessary for all listeners. Let the students listen to the whole text and ask them for the main idea. Encourage them to use their own words to talk about it. It is impossible for them to catch all the information. Therefore, students need to learn to cope with some ambiguity in listening and realize that they can still learn even when they dont understand what they hear. It is very important to give students more practice in this way, because in real life they will not be able to listen to everything. As for the ability to grasp the general idea of the passage, extensive listening method should be used. Teachers can provide students with some idea of what they are going to hear and what they are asked to do with, which helps them succeed in catching the gist of what they are listening to.1.1.4 Listening for specific informationThere are some situations in real life where we listen only for some specific information and ignore the rest. For instance, when we are at a train station or an airport, we listen to announcements only relevant to our travel destinations. it is significantly important to expose our students to seas of types of listening texts for a series of purposes so that they will develop a variety of listening strategies to use for different situations. In listening process, teachers can let students listen with a specific purpose in mind and ask themselves what they are listening for general meaning of the whole lecture or conversation.1.2. While-listening activities1.2.1 Listen and tick While-listening activities are to help listeners understand the text. Listening and ticking, listening and acting and listening and filling are the components of it. Teachers shouldnt expect the learners to try to understand every word but help thelearners process the information actively by involving them in practicing different listening skills.Listen and tick is a kind of common and comparatively easy task. What they should do is to tick items as they hear materials. Just as the old saying goes, Practice makes perfect. The more students practice, the better they are. If students pay more attention to the task, it will be grasped skillfully and students will get higher scores. 1.2.2 Listen and actIt relates to a method of teaching called Total Physical Response, which concentrates on learning language by listening and responding physically to commands or direction. Teachers can use video, movie clips or CD-Ron to help listeners understand and guess meaning through gesture, facial expressions and intonation to have more confidence as well as interest and joy in listening practice. Here is an example, put the pencil on the book, put away your clothes, open the door, stand up, etc. this is an efficient way to develop students listening. 1.2.3 Listen and fillThis is a task that you are probably very familiar with. Students listen to something and fill in the blanks with the words that they hear. It is easy to design this type of task. All you need to do is to decide which words to take out and replace with words. Whether the task is difficult or not depends on how difficult the passage is and what teacher wants students to practice listening to. Teachers can teach listening through using text type to design tasks and help students start the appropriate strategies for different texts.1.3 Post-listening activities1.3.1 Multiple-choice questionsThe most typical type of post-listening task is the