通过兴趣培养增强学生英语听力能力 Students’ listening ability enhancement via interest increasing

Students listening ability enhancement via interest increasing通过兴趣培养增强学生英语听力能力论文摘要。笔者本人从事基础英语培训达七年之久，在多年的工作实践中发现，大部分中国学生，无论英语笔试成绩优异与否，听力能力普遍偏弱。通过分析，笔者发现问题主要是出在教学者的“教学设计”上，主要问题有：1.没有让学生明确听力学习的目的；2.没有帮学生理清听力学习与发展其它英语学习技能的关系；3.没有设计出一套切实可行的教学方案。依据有关的英语教学理论，笔者剖析了以往的听力教学活动，提出了通过改善教学设计来增加学生对听力的学习兴趣。 为此，笔者设计并实施了为期4个月的，以 “PWP”(Pre-listening While-listening Post -listening)为模式，以“Practice”为主要形式的实验性教学，并取得了令人鼓舞的结果：参加教学实验的多数同学都开始喜欢听力学习了。通过对比两次听力模拟考试的结果发现，学生的听力成绩优秀（80分以上）比例由38.5% 提高到了65.5%，说明研究结果基本达到了预期目的。通过本项目的研究和实施，可以提高学生对听力学习重要性的认识，明确听力学习的目的，掌握听力学习的具体方法，特别是尝试解决长期困扰许多学生的所谓“听力训练与以语法及结构为中心的考试的矛盾”，从而纠正“听力训练对这类考试帮助不大”的认识上的偏差。笔者希望本次项目研究可以为受类似教学问题困扰的教师提供一些有价值的帮助，使其抓听力教学的实质，科学地设计听力教学，有效地组织课堂听力活动从而激发学生的听力学习兴趣，切实提高学生的英语听力能力。关键词：明确目的，可行方案，有效方法 AbstractThis paper presents a detailed report of the research implemented to solve the problem that although most of my students are able to pass the written section of exams , they always seem to be quite inefficient at the listening section of exams. They have experienced lots of frustration which result from failure of their exams. Therefore, they lose interest and confidence in listening ability improvement. The reasons why students are so bad at listening are listed as following: (1)students have no specific purposes of listening study;(2) students have no idea about the relationship between listening studying and other English studying skill development;(3)teacher does not have accessible listening training scheme. It is hypothesized that designing activities which carry on PWP approaches would result in higher overall performance for the improvement in listening comprehension ability. This hypothesis is verified by a four-month classroom teaching. Among the methods of scientific investigation used are Socratic Dialogue and Cause Analysis. The study is necessary because it not only emphasizes that the well-designed PWP approaches are effective , but also helps students with their interests and confidence increasing in English listening, which would be particularly beneficial for Chinese students and Chinese teachers of English. It sheds light on current methods of English teaching in primary and middle schools in China and provides more effective and efficient solution .Key words: specific purposes , feasible scheme, efficient solution Table of ContentsnPages. Introduction 1 .Project Background and Company Information2 .Literature Review.Problem identification and analysis1.Problem identification. 2.Problem analysis 2.1 The analytic method2.2 Socratic dialogues2.3 Questionnaire survey 3 Result of problem analysis11.112223334. Project Objective 41 Project objective42 Project hypothesis4.Project Rationale1 The purpose and importance of teaching listening in English course2 PWP model 3 The learners roles and responsibilities 4 Teachers role and responsibilities. Project Design and Implementation 1 Research design- lesson planning 2 Project implementation2.1 Goals 2,2 Subjects 2.3 Material3 Research tools4 Research methods.4.1.Before the research: Problem identified with the first quiz4.2.After the research: Data collection and analysis Results and Discussion1 Summarized data analysis in relation to project hypothesis2 Unsolved problem.Conclusion. Bibliography Appendix Appendix 44445555666666677788101113 Students Listening Ability Enhancement via Interest IncreasingIntroductionThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of designing effective activities for helping students with their listening studying.Listening is so important in our Chinese peoples daily life, especially for people who live in such metropolitan cities like Beijing,Shanghai, and so on. More and more English teachers have realized the importance of developing students listening ability. ”However, few teachers would say it is easy to teach listening. There are two main reasons. First, since listening is a mental activity carried out in one s head, it is very difficult to know exactly what mental processes are involved as one tries to extract meaning from an aural work. Second ,to listen successfully, students should not only understand the language itself but have knowledge of such things as the topic,the context,the speakers and so on.”（Gu yueguo English Language Teaching Methodology1) .However, through the writers own teaching experience, students do encounter more difficulty in listening studying than other English studying skills, eg reading and writing. Therefore, adopting effective and reasonable practice in students listening classes is very important. 1.Project Background and Company Information1.1 Project BackgroundThis project is designed to help students enhance their listening ability through carefully-planned classroom practices. Writer of the thesis have been working on training students with their listening ability and found that the quality and quantity of practices is important, students who have been trained with practices that possess proper difficulty do achieve better marks.Writer designed four-month classroom practice scheme, each month had a specific objective to achieve, Students had to take listening class 8 times per month,2.5 hours every time. During every class, writer always adopt PWP approaches to help students practice their listening,1.2 Company InformationThe name of the company is International Foreign Language Training School .Writer of the paper have been working in this school for nearly 7 years. And students of the school are mostly from middle school ,but intend to continue their study abroad, so most of them need to pass a kind of exams , however ,most of students failed in the listening session of the exams.2 Literature review The purpose for learning English in China has changed in recent years due to the Reform Policy. In the past, daily communication was not the main goal because one didnt need to listen and speak in English. So the Grammar-Translation Method started to become more and more popular .It is the one which has been used in the foreign language teaching for the longest time. It has some advantages which are well known, such as to improve the learning effect through students comprehension to the grammar rules, etc. But the deficiency of it is apparent. For example, it ignores the listening teaching, etc. ( Li , 1983). Because students pay more attention to memorizing lots of grammar rules ,and are unaware of the practical function of learning English-communicating through listening and speaking. ,.“The big breakaway from the Grammar-Translation Method in schools in the west came with the founding of the European Community 1957 as a reaction to the divisions caused by the Second World War” (Gu, 1998). A Functional-Notional Approach emerged in 1960s. It is more effective to train students ability of listening. First it points the language is a kind of tool for communication, the main purpose of teaching is to improve students ability of using the language.( Wilkings, 1974) . “Research done in Applied Linguistics in the 1950s-1970s made it clear that it was not enough to know only the grammatical forms of the language, and that the user of a language also needed to know who to use them with and in which situations. These are matters of politeness and familiarity, for example, and using the expressions appropriate to the situation. This study is known as Sociolinguistics, which covers the social situations in which language is used and the effect it might have.”(Gu yueguo English Language Teaching Methodology1) .And this is the main theory which the project based on.Problem identification and analysis1 Problem identification.In listening class, the students usually listen to the aural material which is prepared by their teacher and expect to understand the contents of the material. Unfortunately, they understand very little of them, teacher replay the aural material many times, students still progress nearly nothing. Then students suffer form failure and frustration, so they become less interested in listening.2 Problem analysis Summary of the problems In my teaching, the problem identified was really a serious one. The preliminary research confirmed that there were four main reasons that accounted for the students lack of interest in listening class. Firstly, some students were unsure of what they had heard because of their wrong pronunciation and poor vocabulary. Secondly, some students misunderstood the listening contents because of their limited background knowledge. Thirdly, some students, particularly those who did not do well in the traditional grammar-oriented reading exam, lacked self-confidence in listening work. They thought that the listening class was only the show time for the “top-students”. Fourthly some students didnt think the listening practices are useful to their grammar-oriented exam, so they were not interested in them at all.The problems had been troubling teachers for a long time and I was determined to work out the solution to the problem. I started off by making an analysis of the problems. 2.1 The analytic method The problem is: students who lose interests in listening practice have different reasons and understanding levels, so teacher noticed the poor listening work design was the main reason the problem. 2.2 Cause analysis: (see Appendix)Teacher did the Cause Analysis on both “teachers side” and “students side”, and analyses the four main reasons of students not being interested in listening practice. Teacher recognized that she should add some Pronunciation Training Activities to improve students pronunciation; give more clear instruction to let students know what to listen and how to listen; offer more encouragement to the “low achievers” with low marks on the “grammar exams” to gain confidence; try to design some listening activities to improve the students ability on the “grammar exam”.2.3 Questionnaire survey: (see Appendix)Teacher designed one questionnaire and distributed to students before conducting the research and required that they finish it within 20 minutes. All of them, nearly 1/3 of students, returned their questionnaires that were left anonymous. When all these data came in, I made some statistical evaluation. The result showed that 100% of the students thought the listening practice was important and that about 80.5% of the students thought listening practice was quite necessary for their future development, which indicated that the students have been fully aware of the importance and necessity of listening practice. But they might encounter difficulties, such as the language level is higher than the students, so they lost their confidence and interest.3 Results of problem analysis: After making the above analysis, Ive got the result that inadequate teaching design is mainly responsible for students lack of interest in listening practice. Students who may come across different kinds of frustrations or failure need to be dealt with differently. So in my future teaching, I will try to improve my listening work design through adding some items to improve the students pronunciation, giving them more encouragement and more detailed instructions for their listening practices, etc.Project Objective 1.Project Objective:The objective of the project is through well-planned classroom practices ,to help students retrieve their interests and confidence ,therefore achieve better listening comprehension ability.2 Project hypothesisIt is hypothesized that learners ability in listening practice can be enhanced by well-designed listening work through PWP 3-stage methodology. Project rationale1.The purpose and importance of teaching listening in English course“Listening is the skill that the students will be judged upon most in real-life situations. It is an important part of everyday interaction and most often the first impression of a person is based on his/her ability to listen smoothly and comprehensibly”(Wang & Cheng , 2000). So as a teacher，I would like to give listening the purpose of communication, making it as close to real-life as possible. It is my responsibility to help students to improve the ability of listening in English both in classroom and in the real world outside the classroom.2.PWP modelWe can divide the listening process into three stages:1)Pre-listening stage2)While-listening stage3)Post-listening stageThe pre-listening stage refers to the period before students begin listening. The main purpose of the pre-listening stage is to introduce enough about topic, background and knowledge of text or purpose of listening to predict what students will hear and make sense of it. While-listening stage is the stage in which students carry out all the activity and teacher observes. Post-listening stage is the last period in which check the students answer and point out their problems.3. The learners roles and responsibilitiesHedge (2002) pointed out that one of the perspectives on learner- centeredness is “ encouraging learners to take on a greater degree of responsibility for their own successful learning, not only by contributing to course or activity design but also by continuing their learning outside class, at home, or in self-access facilities” (page number), so when one is learning English, he (or she) is a person, who is learning by doing it; one is a person, who is working by using it and he (or she) is a person, who lives in it. Make English study a part of ones daily routine, the same as eating or brushing his teeth. Mere exposure to English will not enable people to understand English. Listening English will teach them English!4.Teachers role and responsibilities The teacher has different roles during the PWP three-stage model, in the pre-listening stage, teacher has great control and preparation and plays a role as a demonstrator and commentator. During the while-listening stage ,the teacher will change the role into an organizer, a coordinator and a monitor. At the last stage ,the teacher play the role as a reviewer and a helper. Project Design and Implementation 1 Project Design-Lesson PlanLevel: Upper Intermediate Materials: textbook<step by step>, blackboard, tape, tape-recorder Goals: Students are asked to understand when they listen to an announcement. This lesson will at least make the students take one step to get accustomed to hearing and understanding what they hear. Objectives: By the end of the lesson the students will understand the skill of listening for specific information. ACTIVITIES Pre-listening Activities: The teacher tells the students what they are going to listen to. A background information is tried to be given. . During Listening Activities: While students are listening to the tape the teacher asks them to underline some key words which will help students finish the exercisesPost-listening Activities: The teacher summarize the skills of listening for specific information. 2 Project Implementation 2.1Goal The goal of this research is to increase students ability through material with reasonable difficulty by better-designed listening work.2.2 Subject The subject is that 40 students in one class of International English Training Centre, who are in their early 20s and with lower-intermediate English level.2.3 MaterialThe materials are based on Listen to This (intermediate level) and Step by Step (2005). 3 Research tools: quizzesThe two quizzes designed before and after the project were essentially comparable in1) identifying the problems2) showing the result of the project: two quizzes have the same difficulty and amount of questions are same. One is carried out before the project 4 Research methodsMethod was used and data were collected over a span of roughly one month from the beginning of October，2004 to the end of it. The comparison was made between the results of the two quizzes in percentage. Two quizzes have same question style and difficulty.4.1Before the research: Problem identified with the first quizFour listening activities were designed based on the Listen to This.It took four months to carry out the implementation by using different listening purposes Month 1 In the first month, we did a preparatory and warmup practicing about understanding the basic elements such as letters , spelling, numbers, addresses etc. the goal of this month is to help students build a solid listening ability -to differentiate basic elements which will constitute the sentences and paragraphs students will soon encounter. Month 2 In the second month, we did a listening for detailed information practice based on Unit 2 in <Step by Step>. Students tried to understand contents through multiple choice exercises. Before operating the tape recorder, teacher usually gave some background information first and provide relevant vocabulary for students who have no big vocabulary. While-listening process was normally carried out until students finish the exercises in the textbook. Month 3 In the third month, we did a listening for specific information practice. Especially in some living or semi-official situations, such as renting apartments, looking for jobs , applying for the membership of sport club, and so on. Month 4In the fourth month, students adopted listening practicing in a comprehensive exercises which include gap-filling, chart-filling, multiple choices, short-answer,summary,etc. 4.2 After the research: Data collection and analysisAt the end of the research, the second quiz survey was done to collect the information about the results of the new Teaching-plan. After making an analysis and made the comparison between the results of the two quizzes I have learned that my students interest in listening work has been increased by well-designed listening work. Results and Discussion1 Summarized data analysis in relation to project hypothesisThe results of the two quizzes are presented in Graph 1.Graph 1 shows the comparison of degree of scores before and after the implementation of the project.Figure 1: Comparison of degree of scores Score: >90 89-75 74-65 64-60 <602 Unsolved problemAfter I thought seriously and had exchanged views on the project with my students, I found out that although students are becoming increasingly interested in listening work now, there is still much that needs further improvement. Only when I make continuous reflection in my teaching can I make greater progress. The most frequently mentioned problems can be summarized as the following three:Firstly, the problem of the basic listening element training, .such as names ,addresses, telephone numbers,etc.Secondly, relevant vocabulary is extremely important. Students should spend more time grasping the words. Thirdly, the relationship between listening practice and grammar-oriented exam: In my oral random questionnaire, more than half of students answers to the question “What goal do you want to reach through the listening practice?” are “I hope I can improve my listening ability and pass grammar-oriented exams.” So Id like to have a try on “How to crack the traditional exam by listening practice. If so, the marks of exam and the ability of speaking can be improved at the same time. .ConclusionNearly three months ago, I determined to work on the crucial problem that some of my students are not interested in listening practice.The present study is chiefly based on the project that I proceeded from