How to Improve the Students’ Listening Level.doc

How to Improve the Students Listening LevelAbstractEnglish is the most general language in the world. In recent years, Along with the development of the internal and the internationals situation, Our country increases day by day to demand for English talented person, study English student and social groups population rises suddenly. And the number of people communicating in English is rapidly increasing worldwide. As time passes on. The oral communication as an aim to learn a foreign language becomes more and more important. Listening, as one of the four skills in English study is the important aspect in language human relations and used most widely in peoples daily lives. In developing foreign relation, listening level affects the people to understand and the working efficiency mutually directly. In pace with international communication frequent day after day, and the telecommunication technology develop rapid. To improve the listening ability appears very important .As English teachers we should teach them how to study English, and how to use it, especially we should try our best to improve the students listening level. This paper is to elaborate the problems appeared in listening study and how to improve the Students Listening Level Key words: listening； listening level； communication ； Improve摘要 英语是世界上最通用的语言。近年来,随着国内和国际形势的发展，我国对英语人才的需求日益增加，有志学习英语的学生和社会群体的人数急剧上升，并且用英语交流的人数迅速遍布全世界。随着时间的推延。口头交流在英语学习中变得越来越重要，作为英语学习的四大技能之一的听力是语言交际的重要方面,被越来越广泛的用于人们的日常生活中。在对外交往中，听力水平的高低直接影响着人们相互理解和工作效率,随着国际交流的日渐频繁和电讯技术的迅速发展，提高英语听力能力显得尤为重要。 作为英语老师我们应该教学生怎样学习和运用英语。同时，考虑该怎样提高他们的听力水平。这篇论文阐述了在英语听力学习中存在的问题以及怎样提高学生的听力水平。关键词：听力；听力水平；交流；提高ContentsAbstract i摘要iiContents iiiIntroduction11.The problems in students English study11.1 The problems of English-communication situations11.2 The problems of listening habits21.3 The problems of graded practices 21.4The problems of listening material32.The solutions to the problems42.1 The training of Listening comprehension42.2 The training of interest in students Listening62.3 The method of listening test 72.4 The skills of listening test 82.5 To create the listening environment9Conclusion10Bibliography11Acknowledgement 12Introduction With the development of society, science and technology, English, as a recognized world language, is becoming more and more important in China. With this realization, most of the students are interested in learning English. Teachers are working hard to help students master the language. But there exists a real difficulty. However they have worked in the class, once the students leave the classroom they are back into a totally Chinese world. They may have the ability to read magazines or journals in English, but they find it especially difficult to talk or communicate face to face with a native English speaker. Whats the problem? Is there something missing in our classroom? This essay is going to discuss how to improve the students English level.1. The Problemsin students English studyFor a long time, students have been used to the English learning situation where teachers explain grammatical structures and the content of texts most of the time while students job is to take notes1.1 The problem of English-communication situations.In real-life, Situations we listen for a number of different purposes and our particular purpose will determine the range and balance of listening skills which we need to employ. In the English language classroom teachers need to ensure that learners experience a range of listing purposes especially those that might be immediately relevant to their life outside the classroom. Their role in the class is passive. Although sometimes they have some speaking activities in class, such as doing oral translations, making sentences orally or reading texts aloud, none of these involve communication in which they can express their own opinions, exchange their own ideas or find their own solutions to problems. As a result, students feel frustrated when they are faced with real English-communication situations. They find it difficult to talk with a real native speaker and to express themselves orally. In fact, listening comprehension is an important part of communication and basic to second language learning. In any standard foreign language test, listening comprehension usually occupies a considerable proportion. Yet, to the students whose native language is not English have few opportunities for hearing English outside the classroom .it is usually difficult for them to comprehend English spoken to them.1.2 The problem of listening habits.Many students have their own listening habits. They often try to understand each word or each sentence. They will think hard when they meet some difficult words or sentences, and a great many students could not understand the material directly, They often translate the English into Chinese in their heart, thinking that only in this way can the sentence be understood. As a result, when trying to understand one sentence, they miss the next. So when a conversation or a passage is over, they almost know nothing and are totally at a loss what to do about the exercises they are required to do.1.3 The problem of graded practice In order to develop their listening skills, some students just give them plenty of graded practice and hope that they will work out by themselves. Unfortunately, it only to loss time but have no effect and they can hardly achieve wishes. Some students say” I understand everything but I cant speak ” This may be the case when people speak slowly and carefully to them , realizing that they do not known when they are listening to English programmes on the radio or watching English television or films, or trying to take part in conversations dominated by native speakers. Listening is as difficult as any other skills. When they repeatedly meet with setbacks, they come to the conclusion that listening comprehension is only the eagles nest and it is an impassable chasm. Some even lose their confidence. Actually, the improvement of listening comprehension is beyond reach. Also, it is very useful to bring into the classroom recorded speech in situations from the world outside and with a variety of voices and accents. In view of all the students difficulties in listening, we, as teachers, will have to try our best to use a more gradual approach to help them in various ways. 1.4 The problem of listening materialAs you know, Any approach to the design of listening comprehension materials and classroom activities reflects a view of the nature of listening and the processes it involves. An understanding of the role of bottom-up and top-down processes in listening is central to any theory of listening comprehensions as well as recognition of any the differences between the interaction and transactional dimensions of language use and how these affect listening. Some of them have difficulty in understanding their teacher who gives lessons in English. Many of the students think that the most bothering and most difficult is listening comprehension Without question, it is difficult for a middle school student to understand the listening material, if he hasnt enough vocabulary and the ability of telling the grammar construction. Most of the students with low listening comprehension thing this is because they dont understand or know the knowledge about linguistic, they are not able to tell the what they have heard. on the other hand the response ability is also another reason .Something must be done in English classes to give students more chances to practice speaking English and to encourage them to engage.2. The Solution to the problems For some years now, methodologists have recommended small group work in English listening text classrooms. The benefits of group work are summarized by Long and Porter as follows: it increases the quantity of language practice opportunities; it improves the quality of students talk in several ways; relaxed climate in the classroom and it increases students motivation. With group work, students can practice language use and cooperative learning in which they can form relationship with others and share their beliefs with others with only minimum of direction from teachers. How can we improve the students listening level in a small group? 2.1 The training of listening comprehension We should train students in an orderly way and step by step according to the students actual state. In the initial stage of listening, we should spend some time training students basic skills. Because In the past several years, The purpose of middle school English teaching is to improve the students four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing, great efforts have been exerted to improve studentsability. In listening; reading and writing. However, the ability of speaking tends to be neglected in our teaching. As a result, there are gaps in English proficiency, especially in oral production. In spite of having learned English many years, the students are often at a loss when it comes to speaking. As we often find, many students have some difficulties with their pronunciation, intonation, basic grammar and sentence patterns. It is the actual situation that we cant neglect. If we dont help them to practice hard in the basic skills, it will certainly become the major obstacle in their future study. Thus, at the very beginning, it seems necessary to attach great importance to students basic skills. Besides, students are also required to master some basic vocabulary for everyday use. After a period of such training, we can gradually let them listen to longer sentences, short conversations and some other material which is at appropriate level of linguistic difficulty as regards syntax and vocabulary. If we can do it in this way, students will not have the feeling that listening comprehension is high up and beyond grasp at the very beginning. A good beginning is half done. Good basic skills will certainly make their future study much easier. Another effective way of improving students listening comprehension which can be used in class is to do some dictation exercises. Particular to those students who have been introduced to the language only through reading and writing rather than listening, they often have great difficulty recognizing the spoken forms. Thus, by doing dictation exercises, they can gain a lot. Undoubtedly, we can pay more attention to dictation and regard it as a technique for teaching listening comprehension. If we can do the work frequently, it will be of great help to students. Of course, the material for dictation shouldnt be too long or too difficult, otherwise they will feel that it is really beyond their ken and will dislike it and even abandon it. So be sure to select the proper material and make sure that the exercise will certainly contribute to the improvement of their listening comprehension. 2.2The training of interest in students listening Both listening test and listening practice are necessary, but practice is more important.vq3不准盗库qYou can understand your students through listening tests. Only through the practice can the students improve their listening comprehension In class we should let listening practice be away from the usual kind of memorization exercises often used in classrooms and in language labs. The listening practice should be that students are to listen with full attention to something that interests and challenges them; they are to get the information or get at the meaning of what they hear and then produce a response to show that theyve understood. To do this, we can select material of appropriate interest level. We neednt go over all the items in “Listening Practice” one by one without considering whether it is easy or difficult, interesting or boring. As we know, when one is not interested in something, he cant do it well anyway, even when forced to. So is the case with listening comprehension. Dull material can only make students lose interest at all. As it proves, students perform better with material that they want to listen to because they enjoy it. In order to make the effect of listening comprehension more notable, sometimes we need add something, such as songs, humorous stories, some important news at home or abroad, personal anecdotes, material containing some puzzles to be solved, etc. Enlarge the students knowledge about English. Encourage the students to read something in their spare time about geography, history, culture, stories and so on. For example, there are two materials of the same difficulty. One explains something about Chinas Spring Festival, the other is about Thanks giving Day of the western countries. The former is easy to understand but the latter is more difficult. Why? It is clearly because the students know little about the latter. The teacher can opted for a different approach: They developer exercises that first required students to make predictions; They when had to think of the kinds of questions they might like to ask each person and the kinds of they might like to discuss. Following this they liatened to the conversation samples and compared their prediction with what was actually talk about focusing only on the gist of what was said rather than on specific details. 2.3The method of listening testIf we are going to ask our students to listen to something, we cant just stand or sit there playing the tape-recorder or we cant just explain some words or expressions. We should try to guide our students with our prior knowledge of the material. For instance, we can introduce the topic with short discussion, let them make a guess of what is going to be heard according to the title or give them some hints to help them to understand what they are going to listen to. or to setting the scene for students .as we have said before , listening to passages in the classroom can be more difficult than listening in real life ,because of the lack of contest .so we can help provide the background information to activate learnersschema ,so they will be better prepared to understand what they hear. By doing so, we can arouse their expectations and make them mentally prepared for the listening material. What is more important is to help students to be selective by giving them a purpose for listening. Without a definite purpose, they will be in the dark. When they try to memorize everything, they prove to forget almost everything in the end. So try to ask students one or two questions before first hearing that focus on the main idea or the tone or mood of the whole passage , or ask them to answer the gist questions or prepare to pick out 2 or 3 main points, or the main steps in a process. An example of an exercises that in volves a transactional purpose for listening would be listening to job announcements on a radio program. To prepare for this test, students might first predict jobs to be. Then the students listen to radio announcements about each job and take brief notes. Set tasks which entail concentrating on certain features and throw away irrelevant information. Sometimes if the material is too long, we can split it up into short sections and ask questions appropriate to each short section as we go along. Sometimes if the material is a little difficult, we can introduce it in simple language or let the students write down what they think it is . But, remember, dont say too much or just retell the whole material by yourself. Otherwise, students will have no interest to listen to it or they will not listen to it with great care since they think theyve already known a lot about it. We can also help students to develop the ability of taking notes while listening. In this way, students will not miss the important facts and details. Besides, it is also conductive to the comprehension of a long material.2.4 The skills of listening test Richards. J. C recognized: Bottom-up, these kinds of actives are often more appropriate for learners at a basic level of language proficiency, although the ability to use bottom-up listening strategies is required at all levels of listening. Top-down: This kind of listening is both top-down and transactional, and can bence be represented as. In developing classroom activities and materials for teaching of listening comprehension a clear understanding is needed of a nature of top-down and bottom-up approaches to listening and how these processes relate to different kinds of listening and how these processes relate to different kinds of listening purposes. Two quite different approaches to teaching students to listening materials. In one text, students listen to news items while completing cloze versions of the news transcript. No pre-listening activities are included and no attempt is made to activated or make use of scripts related to the topic of each news items. Hence the task focuses primarily on bottom-up processing. In another text however, students read headlines and beginnings of stories about news events before they listen to new items. They are asked to guess what the headlines and stories are about. Both of these pre-listening tasks help develop a script or schema that students can apply to a subsequent listening task.2.5 To create the listening environment We know the largest difference between mother language learning and foreign language learning is the environment. A child can soon learn his mother language well. He has heard a lot before he can say so