Listening In English Learning

Listening In English LearningContentsContents (1)Abstract (2)Chapter I Introduction (3)1.1 Listening is assuming greater and greater importance in foreign language classrooms (3)1.2 Listening has dominated language pedagogy (4)1.3 Listening purpose is another important variable (5)Chapter II Listening in practice (5)2.1 How to improve listening skil ls (5)2.2 How to arrange listening time (6)2.3 The leaner-centered listening in practice (7)Chapter III Experiments on the validity of the suggested ways (7)Chapter IV Discussion on the experimental r esults (8)ChapterＶConclusion (9)References (9)AbstractAbstract: More and more people use English as their second language. At this great moment, everyone thinks of how to learn it well and they also know listening and reading and writing are three basic skills. But listening in understanding native speakers plays more important role. So how to use it in learning English becomes the priority question. But there are not so many students know how to learn it well; how to improve listening skills and how to arrange listening time. Most students will find much difficulty in studying with the shade that exist in their heart. After a long time studying, they have no self-confidence day by day. Some students can not find the right way and add the anger to teacher and school; some students may want to drop out from school. So this paper can help them solve these problems, and help them seek the real interests and self-confidence. To some extend, they would seek the real wealth in English learning. More and more students will because English user in the near future, and they can also make contributions to our country.Key words: skills; process; time; practiceI Introduction1.1 Listening is assumed of playing greater and greater importance in foreign language classroomsIn learning a foreign language, listening is one of the basic skills. It plays an important role during study. Firstly, no matter which situation we are in, we have to understand what the others have said, then we can respond to the right information. Assuming that if a student couldn’t know about the teachers’ purpose, it is impossible for him to grasp the actual meaning, let alone make great progress on foreign language learning. Secondly, as one of the basic skill, listening affects the other skills, such as reading, speaking and writing. These factors are interconnected. If one couldn’t listen very well, he wouldn’t write and understand what he have listened. At the same time, he has difficulty to speak out his idea. Consequently, these failures will affect his confidence and courage of learning. Therefore, it is vital for students to attach enough importance to listening.Listening is one of the receptive skills because learners have to receive the language from what they have heard. Much of our knowledge comes to us though our ears. What’s more, listening is also an essential means of communication. We are often faced with situations where a great deal depends on our ability to listen. Most people who have to operate in a foreign language environment can recall incidents which brought this truths home to them. As China has entered WTO, we use English more than we used to. It is well-known that English is one of the official languages. Whether it is in formal circumstances or in casual occasion, it is unavoidable to speak English. However, if we didn’t listen to what people have said, how can he communicate with others? Communication depends on listening and speaking, listening is more important. It is necessary to master this skill.There is no denying that listening accounts for a great percentage of examinations. It is almost 35%. For example, in CET-4 and CET-6, listening remains irreplaceable position. It is also the easiest part to lose scores. It has been proved that those who sescore high, is those who’s listening is good. It is goes without saying that “once the principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved”. It is no exception of listening. So much more emphasis should be laid on listening.We should know the problems that exist in our English learning:As far as schools are concerned, the leaders ignore the importance of listening. There is always lacking of enough listening facilities. This is a common phenomenon in junior schools, especially in the countryside. Being shorting of these necessary equipments is one obstacle to hold back the development of listening ability. Furthermore, schools couldn’t provide adequate opportunity for students to practice listening. The leaders pay much more attention to the final marks the students have got.Bad listening habits are also a barrier for students to understand others. Many students like to apply the English-Chinese translation method to their listening tasks. When they hear a sentence, they like to translate it into Chinese. Another bad habit is that they want to understand every word, at the same time they missed many words. To understand the whole text is very difficult, after a long time, they will feel disappointed and have no interest to learn English.In addition, teachers encourage students to read, speak, and write more than listening. These give students a wrong feeling that listening is not very important. They forgot listening in their daily studying, so their listening became very poor.1.2 Listening has dominated language pedagogyThere are two views of listening which have dominated language pedagogy over the last twenty years. These are the bottom-up processing view and the top-down interpretation view. The bottom-up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion, from the smallest meaningful units (phonemes) to complete texts. According to this view, phonemic units are decoded and linked together to form words, words are linked together to form phrases, phrases are linked together to form utterances, and utterances are linked together to form complete meaningful texts. In other words, the process is a linear one, in which meaning itself is derived as the last step in the process. In their introduction to listening Anderson andLynch (1988) call this the "listener as tape-recorder" view of listening because it assumes that the listener takes in and stores messages sequentially, in much the same way as a tape-recorder, one sound, word, phrase, and utterance at a time. (Longman,1990,p3)1.3 Listening purpose is another important variableThe interpersonal functions and transactional functions, and their relationship, before analyzing some problems in listening classrooms that may cause the students' emotional barriers. With consideration of the three greatest elements that often cause emotional barriers in listening: (1)Motivation; (2)self-confidence (3)Anxiety, some experts suggest some methods to remove the barriers, including Visual listening materials, Listening and drawing and TPR listening mode and its extension. The conclusion is that language teachers can train the students to be calm while listening and form good habits. Besides the top-down and bottom-up processes, purpose is another element that influences listening understanding. We can classify the thousands of purposes in the use of a language into two categories: to communicate and to exchange information, and respectively name them the interpersonal functions and transactional functions. But for different people, they have different purpose.II Listening in practiceA lot of students have their own listening habits. Some students 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 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. This is also a reason, trying to understand each word is difficult, and it is not necessary at all. You should catch the most important points. So many people think and find several ways.2.1 Then how to improve the students' listening skill?1. 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 something and walk. Then after he is able to walkand say, he has the chance of listening to more. Before he goes to school, he has already been a good listener and speaker. (zhang Wenhan how to improve listening skill? )But for a foreign language, you can use it only in formal places, classes, for example, otherwise, you can hardly have a chance to use it. So I think you should try to let the students be in a language environment.2. Let the students grasp the phonetic symbol. I think the phonetic symbol is the base.A good intonation and pronunciation depends on the base. Oral reading is a good way at the beginning; Students should do much about it.3. Pay attention to the oral reading skill, It includes stress, strong form, weak form, intonation incomplete plosive consonant, affricate consonant, syllable and so on. Training and practicing the oral reading is not a day's word. The teacher must give correct information about it. There is no easy way.4. 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 matter. One explains something about China's 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.Both listening test and listening practice are necessary, but practice is more important.You can understand your students through listening tests. Only through the practice can the students improve their listening comprehension.Students only mastered listening skills is limited, because life time of different people is different. They need to know which time is the best for them to studying.2.2 How to arrange listening timeAs the above-mentioned, listening is so important, but how to arrange listening time effectively? Some people say the golden time (in the morning) in a day is useful time for us to listen English; others take the view that we should listen after class. As far as I amconcerned, we can take any time to practice provided that we are energetic. What’s more, at that time we could concentrate on listening material carefully. Every day we invest listen to something at least 30 minutes and persist on it. For example, if one would like to listen to radio on the morning, he can make full use of this efficient time to improve his listening ability. However, as different people have different living cycles, so the most important time if listening for different people is different. If some one come to want to advise for improving his or her listening ability, I give him or her sometime to think carefully what is the excite time he or she want to use in listening. The quiet evening is a good choice, other time also if will use it as yourself listening time. When listening, we should try our best to make full use of it. Listening to news broadcast, try to obtain the general idea. In addition, we should use every chance we have to listen everything. It is important for listeners to adopt a flexible range of listening strategies. This can be done by holding the listening text constant (working, say, with a radio broadcast reporting a series of international events), and listen to the text several times.It is often believed that “success calls for hard work, and hard work leads to success.”Therefore, it is necessary for listeners to keep on listening everyday. The more they listen, the more they are familiar with all kinds of listening materials; we are able to make progress in listening. All in all, time and skills they mastered is still not enough, they should have tasks and they also should have goals in their daily studying.2.3 The leaner-centered listening in practiceA learner-centered dimension can be lent to the listening class in one of two ways. In the first place, tasks can be devised in which the classroom action is centered on the learner not the teacher. In tasks exploiting this idea, students are actively involved in structuring and restructuring their understanding of the language and in building their skills in using the language. Secondly, teaching materials, like any other type of materials can be given a learner-centered dimension by dotting learners involved in the process underlying their learning and making active contributions to the learning. This can be achieved in the following ways:1. Making instructional goals to the learner.2. Giving learners a degree of choice.3. Giving learners opportunities to bring their own background knowledge and experience into the classroom.4. Encouraging learners to develop a reflective attitude to learning and to develop skills in self-monitoring and self-assessment.III Experiments on the suggested waysI have mentioned four methods to improve listening skills. In order to know which way is the best, so we decided to choose one hundred students, and divided these students into five groups. As for the first group, teachers create a language environment and listeners will find more opportunities to practice. Just as the above-stated suggested way of improving listening skills, teachers should try to let the students be in a real scene. Then students can concentrate on their listening. According to the stastics, only 30% students made much progress.For the second group, the students can grasp phonetic symbol. As the phonetic symbol is the base, students should do much more about it. The more they practice, the greater progress they get. In this way, students listen to some words, then the whole sentence, and finally understand the meaning. This method is effective. Although some students fail to do much better, 45% students have obtained encouraging.The third group uses the third skill. They pay attention to the oral reading skill. Though this way, their pronunciation, stress, strong form and weak form improved a lot. Consequently, they can grasp the main idea and important words easily. And their intuition about listening is another progress, 52% students approve this method.The fourth group applies the fourth method. As we all know that listening is closely connected with other English learning, the students in one aspect should enlarge their knowledge about English. Learning a language does not know something about the whole but the details. The experiment on reading and listening more books on geography, history, culture, politics, economics and stories, has widen students horizon and enrich their knowledge. Only in this way, can they get more from English learning. There are only 63%students find it made listening easier by enlarging vocabulary.The fifth group uses all the suggested skills in a comprehensive way. Given some certain listening materials might, in the first instance, be required to listen for gist, simply identifying the countries where the events have taken place. The second time they listen they might be required to listen to match the places with a list of events. Finally, they might be required to listen for detail, distinguishing specific aspects of the event, or perhaps, comparing the radio broadcast with newspaper accounts of the same event and nothing discrepancies or difference of emphasis. The results of a survey show that these methods are practical to learners, through which they can connect the theoretical study with daily life. There is nearly 83% students have made much more progress.IV Discussion on the experimental resultsAs the suggest ways of improving listening skills really bring us benefits and experts and educators have recommended us to follow. In my opinion, these are the imperative things we should do.As the experimental results encouraging. Experts have discussed it and pointed out that students should follow those methods. What’s more, they also recommend that students should form the habits of practice listening in their own way. Listener should develop the awareness of the process underlying their own learning so that, eventually, they will be able to take greater and greater responsibility for that learning. This can be done though the adoption of a learner-centered strategy at the level of classroom action, and partly though equipping students with a wide range of effective learning strategies. Though these, students will not only become better listeners, they will also become more effectives to focus on, and reflect upon, the processes underlying their own learning. This is important, because if learners are aware of what they are doing, if they are conscious of the processes underlying the learning they are involved in, then learning will be more effective. Key strategies that can be taught in the listening classroom include selective listening, listening for different purpose, predicting, progressive structuring, intervening, and personalizing. These strategies should not be separated from the content teaching but woven into the ongoing fabric of the lesson so that learners can see the application of the strategies to the development of effective learning.V ConclusionIn this paper, I have set out the nature of the listening process, listening in practice, experiments on the validity of the suggested ways and discussion on experimental results.I have suggested that listener need to adopt and develop some listening skills in listening. What I want to steer is the importance of a strategies-based approach to substantial amounts of authentic data because they will not (and should not expect to) understand every word. The access to listening is not an easy way. However, if we take effect measures, we can move forward quickly and our education will become more and more advanced. But for different students, those methods may not be very effective. So there are some student need to find new methods to improve listening skills in their daily studying. One person can not think a perfect solution to solve every problem for every student. So I need more advice to make my paper perfect.ReferencesRost, M.. Listening in language learning. London: Longman(1990).Rost, M.. Listening in action. London: Prentice Hall(1991).Brown, G.. Listening to spoken English (2nd ed.). London: Longman(1990).Rost, M.. Introducing listening. London: Penguin(1994).Brown, G., & Yule, G.. Teaching the spoken language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press(1983).Zhang Wenhan, how to improve listening skill? 。