An Analysis on How to Improve MiddleSchool Students’ Listening Abilities

1、关于提高中学生听力能力的分析an analysis on how to improvemiddle-school students listening abilities contentsabstract.1key words.1i. introduction.2ii. literature review.21. research in teaching bottom-up skills.22. research in raising metacognitive awareness of listening.3 3. research in teaching students how to l

2、isten.4iii. the importance of listening in english learning.5iv. characteristics of the listening process.5v. existent problems in listening class.61. teaching material.72. teaching methodology and the teacher.73. students.9vi. tactics on teaching and learning of listening.101. to enlarge students v

3、ocabulary by extensive reading.102. to use the authentic english and context.103. to balance extensive listening and intensive listening.114. to train listening comprehension in daily teaching practice.125. to focus on the comprehension.126. to learn to catch the main idea of a paragraph.137. to com

4、bine listening and speaking.13vii. conclusion.13references.14an analysis on how to improve middle-school students listening abilitiesan analysis on how to improve middle-school students listening abilities abstract: the purpose of middle school english teaching is to improve the students four skills

5、: listening, speaking, reading and writing. now most of the students do better in reading and writing than in listening and speaking. they can read and write, but they can hardly communicate. the fact that most of the students cant understand the native speakers does exist. this is partially because

6、 of our examination system, and partially of the teaching method. we are not able to change the examination system, but we can improve our teaching method. during the processes of english listening teaching, the teacher has to inspire the students interests of listening and find out the obstacles of

7、 listening and solve it timely. this is the best way to conquer “deaf english”, also the only way to improve the qualities of english listening teaching. this thesis tells us the importance of listening and analyzes the problems which english listening if facing in terms of teaching materials, metho

8、dology, students and teachers attitudes towards it. key words: listening; improve; methodology 摘要：中学英语教学的目的就是提高学生“听、说、读、写”四种技能。现在大多数学生的读写能力都强于听说能力。他们可以阅读和写作但是很难去交流。很大一部分学生听不懂英语国家人说话的事实是存在的。一部份原因在于我们的考试体系，还有一部分原因在于教学方法。我们没有能力去改变考试体系，但是我们可以改进我们的教学方法。在英语听力教学中，老师应当激发学生对听力的兴趣并且及时发现学生在听力训练中存在的问题找出解决方法。这是最

9、好的克服“聋子英语”的方法，也是提高英语听力教学质量的必由之路。本文告诉我们听力的重要性，主要分析了目前中学英语听力教学在教材、教法和学习方法方面的现状。关键词：听力；改进；方法 i. introduction with the reforms and development in all walks of life and the carrying out of the opening policies to the outside world in china in recent years, the traditional grammar-translation method of th

10、e foreign language teaching has been found unable to keep pace with the times. this has given rise to many new thoughts and concepts of it. language is the means by which people communicate with each other. as a result, the communicative approach is getting more and more widely used in chinese middl

11、e school english classrooms. language is the means by which people communicate with each other. 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 thro

12、ugh obstacles to the listening and improve their abilities. in recent years, theories have been put forward on the teaching of listening 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 spoken english are the key fe

13、atures of english classes. its application is based on the view that english should be taught as a communicative tool, not merely a kind of the knowledge of language. in this case, the students listening ability must be the most important thing for teachers to improve. as english teachers, we should

14、 devote ourselves to the reforms of teaching systems and develop suitable teaching methods so that we could improve the quality of listening teaching. however, it is a very difficult job. how can we manage it? this is the very subject i am to deal with. here in my thesis, some issues related to impr

15、oving senior students listening ability in chinese middle school classrooms are to be discussed in the following parts: background study；the natures of listening and how to improve students listening abilities-designing and performing effective classroom activities. ii. recent research into teaching

16、 of listening1. research in teaching bottom-up skillssegalowitz maintains that automatization of word recognition skills, i.e. fluent bottom-up processing, is critical for successful listening comprehension. motivated by this theoretical premise, poelmans investigated the effects of training. contra

17、ry to expectations, she found no significant differences between the two groups in the final comprehension measure. poelmans attributes this finding to a discrepancy between the two groups in the contents and exercises of the training and testing conditions, as well as insufficient training. the dec

18、ontextualized nature of the stimulus materials may also explain the finding. however, osada attributes lack of success in listening to an overemphasis on bottom-up skills. based on his analysis of answers to questions and idea unit analysis, he found that low-proficiency japanese students of learnin

19、g english tended to adopt a mental translation approach to listening. he argues for more emphasis on a top-down approach because, given the constraints of working memory, beginner-level listeners cannot construct meaning when process connected speech on a word-by-word basis only.efficient and effect

20、ive use of bottom-up skills in comprehension appears to be related to the degree to which word recognition skills are automatized. mecartty found that both grammatical knowledge and vocabulary knowledge could explain the variance. the variance for listening, however, is less than for reading. mecart

21、ty concludes that, although comprehension processes in listening and reading share similar characteristics, vocabulary knowledge is less important for listening.2. research in raising metacognitive awareness of listeningin recent years, a lot of studies on the differences between more skilled and le

22、ss skilled listeners have been carried out. for example, the studies by goh, hasan, mareschal, and vandergrift have produced some useful insights. grounding their research in earlier work by omalley and chamot, these findings highlight the importance of the effective use of metacognitive strategies

23、for successful listening comprehension. in a study of adolescent learners of french, vandergrift found significant quantitative differences for four strategies: (a) total metacognitive strategy use, (b) comprehension monitoring, (c) questioning elaboration, and (d) online translation. a qualitative

24、analysis of think-aloud protocols reinforced these differences, in addition, found that the successful listener used an effective combination of metacognitive and cognitive strategies, this finding also reported by goh and mareschal.given the importance of metacognitive awareness in successful liste

25、ning, vandergrift investigated the effect of a strategies-based approach on student awareness of the process of listening. students completed listening tasks where they also engaged in prediction, monitoring, problem solving, and evaluation. these tasks helped students learn or bring to consciousnes

26、s metacognitive knowledge for self-regulation in listening. both elementary school students and university students of french found it motivating to learn approach. students commented on the power of predictions for successful listening, the importance of collaboration with a partner for monitoring,

27、 and the confidence-building role of this approach for enhancing their ability to comprehend oral texts. the use of metacognitive strategies is not unique to successful sl/fl listening. although listeners have automatized word recognition skills, they also use metacognitive strategies for self-regul

28、ation in listening when they need to redirect attention to bolster waning interest or to critically evaluate what they hear. imhof reports on a study of university students enrolled in a communications class who were taught three strategies and asked to apply them in a number of situations: attentio

29、n management, asking pre-questions, and elaboration. after some adaptation of strategies to personal needs over time, students reported they have improved listening habits: more sustained attention, more comprehensive understanding, deeper level of processing, and more reflective assessment.3. resea

30、rch in teaching students how to listeninstruction in listening has too often been associated with testing, focusing on the product of listening. a focus on the right answer only, when the listener is incapable of keeping up with the speech rate, often creates a high level of anxiety, which, in turn,

31、 affects attention capacity. while a focus on product allows the teacher to verify comprehension, the answer reveals nothing about the process; i.e., how students arrived at comprehension. to help listeners develop strategies to compensate for gaps in understanding, teachers need to understand how l

32、isteners arrived at answers, particularly incorrect answers. this information can then be used for diagnostic purposes, particularly in helping the less skilled listener to discover and try out more efficient strategies.recent literature on listening instruction indicates a greater interest in raisi

33、ng student awareness of the process of listening. a process approach can help students learn how to listen, guiding them through the stages that seem to characterize real-life listening. using this approach, teachers can help beginning-level students learn how to comprehend short, authentic texts on

34、 topics related to student level and interest. the metacognitive strategies underlying this approach help listeners become more aware of how they can use what they already know to fill gaps in their understanding. this approach has been used successfully with beginning-level language learners at dif

35、ferent age. it can also be used with profit by more advanced-level listeners faced with a difficult text or an unfamiliar variant of the target language. field argues that this approach can help “risk takers” to carefully evaluate their hypotheses in the light of contradictory evidence, and “risk av

36、oiders” to make plausible predictions and accept that a potential discrepancy between predictions and outcome is not a mark of failure. vandergrift argues that this approach helps listeners develop metacognitive knowledge, critical to the development of self-regulated listening. field and vandergrif

37、t would agree that students need systematic practice in using listening strategies that will be useful outside of the classroom; this pedagogical cycle models real-life listening.iii. the importance of listening in english learningthere are four skills when we use language to communicate: listening,

38、 speaking, reading and writing. and also, listening, speaking, reading and writing are the basic factors of english. why do we put listening into the first place of these four factors? it shows that listening plays a basic and important role in these four factors. on one hand, we always learn to spe

39、ak and listen before reading and writing. on the other hand, listening and reading are called input, speaking and writing are called output. when people using language, there is input first, and then output. and also, listening is helpful to the whole english comprehension. listeners can infer the r

40、eal meaning of speaker through stress, pronunciation, intonation etc.english is a kind of language. the purpose of learning a language is to train and improve the ability of how to communication synthetically. the ability of communication means the ability of expressing the thoughts by word of mouth

41、 or by writing skill. so, there are two ways to use english: speaking and writing. people always use speaking rather than writing in common life. how can we speak out and speak well? listening is the key point. when infant learning their mother tongue, they always imitate on the base of listening. w

42、e always connected listening with speaking together. speaking only happens on the basic of listening. there is an old saying: most deaf cant speak. its hard to image a person can communicate with others if he only uses books but without any listening materials when he studies.as a matter of fact: li

43、stening is the most difficult thing when people use foreign language to communicate. when in communication, you cant give response if you cant understand what the speakers say. thus it can be seen, listening plays an important role both in language learning and communication, especially in this mode

44、rn society which emphasizing the ability of listening and speaking.iv. characteristics of the listening process it is important to understand the characteristics or processes behind these listening situations so that our teachers can design appropriate activities to help our students to develop effe

45、ctive listening habits and strategies.1. spontaneity while some of the things that we listen to are rehearsed, e.g. radio news, television news and shows, movies, theatre, and some formal lectures, most of the time during an average day we listen to people speaking spontaneously and informally witho

46、ut rehearsing what they are going to say ahead of time. 2. context the context of listening is usually known in real life. in other words, we know the relationship between the listener and the speaker. therefore, the situation helps us to predict what we are going to hear.3. visual clues most time w

47、e can see the person we are listening to. this means we can see their facial expressions, gestures and other body language as well as the surrounding environment, which is relevant when, for example, people point at objects or in certain directions. these visual clues help us understand and predict

48、what we hear. of course there are situations where we cannot see the speaker, such as when we listen to the radio or use the telephone.4. listeners response most of the listening in daily life allows the listener to respond to the speaker, such as in a conversation. this means we can interrupt the s

49、peakers and ask for repetition or clarification.5. speakers adjustment in most cases, the speaker is talking directly to the listener, so he or she can adjust the way of speaking according to the listeners reactions. for example, if the listener indicates that he or she does not understand what is b

50、eing said, the speaker may rephrase or elaborate.v. existent problems in listening classnowadays, in our country, the importance of listening in mid-school english teaching is noticed by majority. most of people think listening is important. but what the actuality is, now? our prime minister lee lan

51、qing said that our english teaching took more time but with low efficiency. there is an example that we are familiar with: its common that the graduated students in english major cant understand what the native said and even cant make themselves understand. from this reality we can infer that the en

52、glish teaching in our country is still at a low level. the most important thing we should do research is how to improve the mid-school students listening ability and how to train students to get the result twice with half the effort. there are some weaknesses in mid-school students english teaching.

53、 we will analyze them from the aspects of teaching material, teaching methodology , teachers and students.1. teaching material before 1990s, there were no materials special for listening training, only the tape of the books. as the development of science and technology in our country, there are all

54、kinds of listening materials are published. the content came down to daily life, study, work with the format of vcd, dvd, mp3 etc. teachers dont have to worry about the lacking of material. the intonation, pronunciation and speed of most of the materials in the market are close to the daily life. th

55、ere are helpful to improve the students four skills. but in many mid-schools, there are also many problems in the listening materials. the commonly problems are as follows:1) the speed of the speech is too slow. linking and plosion are usually used in oral english, but cant be expressed in the speech which the speed is too slow. most listening materials that