HowtoImproveMiddleSchoolStudents’ListeningSkills.doc

How to Improve Middle School Students Listening SkillsOutlineI: Introduction-1II: Problems in Listening Comprehension-12.1、Failing to keep up with the pace-12.2、Failing to select the right answers while listening to the words clearly-12.3、Failing to understand the main ideas of listening materials-22.4、Regarding listening as extremely difficul-2III: The Causes of Problems Resulting from English Listening -23.1、The speed-23.2、Lack of the language environment-23.3、Vocabulary barriers-33.4、Language pronunciation barriers-43.5、Lack of examination skills-43.6、Different speakers have different effects on listeners-43.7、Psychological barriers-43.8、Cognitive factors-53.9、Memory techniques-53.10、Imagination abilities-5IV:The Ways of Improving Listening Skills in Junior Middle School Students-54.1、In class as well as in English teaching-54.2、Predicting-64.3、Setting scenes-64.4、Cultivating good listening habits and fostering interest-74.5、Teachers emphasis on the pronunciation foundation-84.6、Guidance law-84.7、Practicing & Testing-94.8、Applying teaching methods to training students listening forms-104.9、Encouraging communication with each other-114.10、Asking for help & Exchanging experiences-11V： Conclusion-12Reference-13How to Improve Middle School Students Listening SkillsAbstract: Listening is one of the most important parts of studying English. It is an essential tool to absorb the language materials.But in the process of English studying, many students often feel difficult to foster and improve their listening abilities.It is English teachers responsibility to help students to improve their listening skills. This paper discusses problems resulting from English listening in Middle School students. The author analyzes the reasons of the difficulty in English listening and the current situations of teaching English listening, as well as the reasons why English listening is very poor in middle school students. Then the author gives some advice. At the end of the paper, the author will emphasize the importance of listening, and hope all the teachers to pay attention to English listening guidance.Key words: English listening, listening ways, difficulties, solutions How to Improve Middle School Students Listening SkillsI、Introduction: The purpose of English teaching focuses on cultivating students abilities of communicating in English, which contains four main skills, including listening, speaking, reading and writing. Listening is an important and difficult task for middle school students.English teachers often regard it as a common problem of improving students listening and speaking skills, while the traditional teaching mode emphasizes more on reading and writing skills. It is well known that gaining the basic knowledge of English and fostering the capability of using English are all for the purpose of communication. The right training order of the four skills should be listening ahead of speaking, speaking ahead of reading, reading ahead of writing. Students of middle schools are lively. They like to speak and act, and are eager to get knowledge and to be imitative. They are not afraid of speaking wrongly.So most of them can take an active part in the training, especially in the training of listening and speaking.Teachers should insist on training students listening and speaking skills according to their characteristics, pay more attention to their pronunciation and intonation, guide them to practice listening all the time, master and use English correctly.It can not only improve the students learning interest but also heighten their confidence. It will surely be a good start in their later study.The development of good listening skills often has a positive effect on speaking and reading abilities.From the points of the above, listening precedes speaking and it provides a basis for language learning.So if the teacher wants to develop the students reading and writing skills, enhance the quality of English teaching in junior middle schools, then more attention should be paid to the teaching of listening.II、Problems in Listening Comprehension2.1 Failing to keep up with the paceStudents listening speed cannot keep up with the speakers speaking speed. 2.2 Failing to select the right answers while listening to the words clearly Students can listen to words of listening materials clearly, but they still cannot understand what they mean. Students do not have good techniques to use in listening process and they cannot seize the important details, thus resulting in various listening contents confusing their thoughts. There are a hundred Hamlets in one hundred readers. Different students have different understanding in the same listening material, and different information they gather from the material. It is common for students to listen to the words clearly but still cannot match the words with the correct answers.2.3 Failing to understand the main ideas of the listening materials Students cannot understand the recorded materials. For the same word, its pronunciation in the recorded materials is different from what the students have remembered. Students cannot figure out the listening materials broadcast by different speakers or media.2.4 Regarding listening as extremely difficult and disliking to do the listening practice Students fear to do the listening practice and they do not like to do it. Once they start listening, they get no idea in their minds. They forget the meanings of words and fail to recall the words in their minds, which results in the wrong information selected from the listening materials. Their answers are near the right answers but still are not correct.III、Causes of Problems Resulting from English Listening3.1 The speedListeners cannot follow the speed of speakers. Students reading speed is slow at ordinary times. And also, in order to make sure that students listen clearly, some teachers often slow down the speed of speaking. As a result, students are usually accustomed to slow tones. But the speaking speed in the listening tests is always faster. Students are used to relatively slow speed, so when listen to the tape, they always find it difficult to keep up with the speakers speed. They often get stuck in the former sections when the later section has already begun. They concentrate on finding answers but ignore the contents of the conversations, resulting in being confused about the answers and then selecting the wrong ones.3.2 Lack of the language environment Language learning and the language environment are inseparable. Studies have show that as long as being in the language environment, it will be an easy job to mater a language, because language environment provides one of the most effective and direct way to learn and use the language to communicate. While the middle school are located in remote mountains, suffering relative shortage of teaching resources, students are not likely to be in an English-speaking environment neither in classrooms or outside the campus.Therefore, students have little opportunity for exposure to English, so the occasional English class will be the only language environment for them. In such a vulnerable language environment, more time and efforts should be paid to improve their English listening skills.On the one hand, English teachers speak more Chinese most times during class than English, because many students cannot understand what they are talking about and ask their teachers to speak more Chinese. On the other hand, students use Chinese for communication in everyday life and seldom practice English with their classmates and teachers. To influence students listening comprehension depends on the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar problem. Students can understand a single word, but why cannot they understand the whole sentences? One of the reasons is that social background knowledge is not solid. If the students lack understanding in the social culture of English country, they will make errors in listening comprehension. So if students social background knowledge is richer, listening comprehension will be easier. Basic language knowledge pronunciation, vocabularies, grammars are defined specifically, listening comprehension is the essential condition and foundation. If they dont have certain language knowledge base, listening materials will be difficult to understand. The language foundation of knowledge directly determines what the students levels are in the listening. Richer language knowledge is, stronger ones listening comprehension can be. If a student could even tell the stresses and pauses, the rising and falling tones, he or she would surely grasp the contents of listening materials easily. But the reality is that most students have trouble in understanding the listening materials, so to improve their own pronunciation is necessary. If they pronounce a word wrongly but they are not aware of that, they may not figure out the same word during their listening tests. So it is important to teach students the correct pronunciation. Teachers can use tapes, multimedia or radios to show students hoe to pronounce a word correctly. Following the tapes is always a simple but effective way to do this. Grammatical knowledge is also the same, it is to help us understand correctly the acoustic material conditions and is necessary for us to judge time, places, characters and events. If the knowledge of grammar is not stable, it will directly influence the effect of listening comprehension.Whats more, if there were not sufficient understandings in western cultures, mistakes would appear in the listening practice. Even if students grasp every word the speakers say, they still are not able to choose the right answers. 3.3 Vocabulary barriers If students do not have sufficient vocabulary storage, they will not understand the listening materials. How can they select the right answers when they even do not know what the speakers are talking about? So it is vital for teachers to teach students enough vocabularies. Languages are kinds of spiritual wealth which are created by humans. They are also a part of culture, just like mirrors and reflect a nations culture. Whats more, studying another language sometimes help us to understand our own language. A picture, a kind of emotion or a scene can give people inspiration and help to expand their vocabularies. Secondly, culture differences affect students understanding abilities. Although there are some similarities in English and Chinese culture, there are also more significant differences between them. Because the lack of understanding in foreign life habits, cultural features, many people often complain that they can understand every word, but still cant figure out the conversations between foreign speakers. Cultures cover very wide aspects, which can be strengthened through the learning of the traditional British culture and other new cultures of English-speaking countries.3.4 Language pronunciation barriers. Students may not master the linguistics well, which often causes some understanding barriers, especially in the pronunciation. If their pronunciation is not accurate, especially for similar words, such as week-wake-weak, cheer-chair, hand-had, jeep-sheep, beat-bit, count-cant, they might be confused when listen to the similar words and fail to tell different words in their listening tests. Even speaking Chinese can contain accents. Similarly, people from different areas speaking English can have different accents. Especially for those English teachers who have not be trained to pronounce correctly and use the right tones. They cannot read the sentences with rising or falling tones and their pronunciation is far from the standard one.3.5 Lack of examination skills First of all, students do not know how to make the best of the limited time before listening test and analyze the implicit information given by the listening tests, so they have no clear direction and selectivity during the listening process. Secondly, students will think more about a few words during the process of listening tests because they have not understood them clearly, which may affect the whole understanding of the test. Last but not least, some students want to understand all of the details and meanings of the test, which seems unnecessary and may indirectly affect the accuracy of the answers. Once something is not understandable, its easy to be irritable.3.6 Different speakers have different effects on listenersDifferent speakers produce the same sound in different ways, such as different dialects and accents, stresses, rhythms, intonations, mispronunciations and so on. Heavy accents and different habits of pronunciation contribute to the lack of standardization in their daily pronunciation, thus resulting in mistakes during their listening practice with relatively standard British English and American English. The listeners have little or no control over the speed of the input of listening materials. And also, listeners cannot pause to work out the meaning of the materials. At the same time, speech is more likely to be distorted by background noises or the media that transmit sound. To adapt to different styles of different speakers is a difficult task for most of the middle school students.3.7 Psychological barriersListening comprehension is a more complex psychological process. Students gain low points and are easy to produce the fear of listening in a passive state, which result in too much tension and less concentration on listening. This will in turn lead to much loss of points. Some students want to listen to every word clearly during listening comprehension, which also plays a negative effect on understanding of the whole article. In addition, the external environment such as indoor and outdoor noises, radio cassette player qualities may also affect the students listening comprehension during the listening process.Furthermore, emotion factors mean that students in the learning process have shown feelings. Emotional states will largely influence the students learning behaviors and learning effects. On the one hand, positive feelings help students pay more attention to learning, eliminate interference and concentrate on their studies. On the other hand, some of the bad feelings will cause students psychological anxiety, boredom, fear and inferiority, thereby affecting students to improve listening comprehension.3.8 Cognitive factorsModern education science and psychology as well as learning styles on learning process play a direct role, and cognitive learning style is an important factor . The cognitive style refers to learners in information processing (including receiving, storage, conversion, extraction and use of information ) being used to different techniques. With different cognitive styles, students learning English have different characteristics, resulting in different comprehension as well. Some students have active minds and they can form their own ways of learning during teachers guidance and their studying process. There are other students who cannot figure out their own studying methods. They just follow the teacher and have fixed thinking.3.9 Memory techniques Listeners lack certain memory techniques, so they cannot catch the main ideas of the listening materials. They want to listen to the every word clearly and try to understand the whole meaning of the listening materials. They think that all details in the materials are related to the final answers. Once they ignore something, they are not able to select the right answers. It is a pity when students understand the conversations but forget which one is the right answer.3.10 Imagination abilityThe same word used in different situations may have different meanings, so it requires good imagination. Imaging yourself in the scene of the content of the listening materials will lower the difficulty in listening process. Chinese students are trained to follow the exam-oriented education system since they are kids. All they have learned is aimed to gain good scores. There are stereotypes in Chinese articles and history as well as politics learning. Years imitation have caused fixed thinking in students minds. Students cannot get their minds scattered and they fail to understand English words according to the differen