毕业论文-the-comprehension-and-feeling-towards-college-english-listening-learning---对于大学英语听力.doc

英语毕业论文

论文题目：The Comprehension and Feeling towards College English Listening Learning
对于大学英语听力学习的理解和感悟
课程名称： 英语学习策略
学生姓名： 学号： 11090430
院 系： 外 国 语 学 院 英 语 系
班 级： 英本114班 序号： 30
任课教师： 职称： 副教授
提交时间： 2012 年 1 月 5 日
成 绩：

11

Contents

Abstract 1
Key Words 1
1. Introduction 2
1.1 The importance of English listening in college 2
1.2 Current situation of English listening in college 3
2. Some theories concerning English listening 3
2.1 The definition of listening 3
2.2 The Audio-Lingual Method 4
2.3 Tasked-based Listening 4
3. Three problems in listening learning and the solutions 5
3.1 Problems in listening materials 5
3.1.1 Lack various listening materials 5
3.1.2 Old and unauthentic materials 5
3.1.3 Unrealistic listening materials 6
3.1.4 Solutions to the problems in listening materials 6
3.2 Problems in Teacher’s Teaching Methods 7
3.2.1 Traditional Listening Teaching Method 7
3.2.2 Lack Interactive Activities in the Class 7
3.2.3 Solutions to the Problems in Listening Leaching 8
3.3 Problems Concerning Students in Listening Learning 8
3.3.1 No English Environment 8
3.3.2 Lack Autonomy of Practicing Listening 8
3.3.3 Choose Inappropriate Listening Materials 8
3.3.4 Solutions to the Problems Concerning Students 9
4. Conclusion 10
Bibliography 11

The Comprehension and Feeling towards
College English Listening Learning

Abstract：English as a human language for speech communication. Today, the information has increased sharply, international association of frequence has been more important. How to improve the English listening , more people paid more attention to. The modern language education theory attaches great importance to listen to in language learning and the function of language use, listen to teaching being ignored and lack of scientific conditions are changed.
I write this thesis to show some problems and some solutions just from my own experience.

Key Words: Listening; unrealistic materials; effective and correct approaches

The Comprehension and Feeling towards
College English Listening Learning
FLC 2012 (01) (English) ZhengSong

1. Introduction

1.1 The importance of English listening in college
As we all know, China has entered into the WTO and has held the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. successfully. China is in urgent need of many different kinds of professionals with a super level of English language proficiency, and English has become a craze nowadays. The four skills listening, speaking, reading and writing have been greatly improved on the part of Chinese students. However, in China, the four skills have not developed at the same rate. For most students listening and speaking remain the most difficult skills to master. After over ten years of learning English, most students couldn’t understand what foreigners say let alone talk with them. Therefore, to cultivate students’ ability of listening is the first and foremost requirement of English teaching in college in our country
In recent years, some teachers at colleges have already made researches on English listening. They have studied the nature of listening, the methods of listening, the theories of classroom listening, models of classroom listening teaching and so on. The results of these researches are all valuable to the learners.
Most teachers think they can improve students’ listening ability by saying English as much as possible during the class, letting students do duty report at the beginning of class, using CAI（Computer Assisted Instruction）and so on. As the ability to communicate effectively in English is now a well-established goal in English language teaching, the importance of listening comprehension in communication has been widely accepted. The point has been frequently made that when one is engaged in communication, he devotes approximately 9% of his attention to writing, 16% to reading, and 30% to speaking, but he devotes 45% to listening. Besides listening plays a key role in the second language acquisition. The Input Hypothesis put forward by Krashen claims that a considerable amount of comprehensible input is indispensable for successful second language acquisition to take place. And he goes further to indicate that the major channel for meaningful input is the “auditory channel.

1.2 Current situation of English listening in college
Despite a gradually increasing acceptance of the significance of listening comprehension, in college, listening teaching and research are not satisfactory. It is often heard comment that listening comprehension is a somewhat neglected skill. In other word, it seems that listening does not draw enough attention of both students and teachers in China’s English language teaching and learning. Even though some teachers have realized its importance, listening teaching still does not go beyond the stage of play-the-tape-and-check -the -answers.
Teachers are devoted to getting students to listen and complete the listening tasks instead of taking the students as individuals who learn usefu1 skills to cope with listening comprehension. In this case, students listen mechanically to various materials and try different comprehensive exercises. If they can not catch the meaning for the first time, usually the teacher encourages them to try a second time just in time for the tape to be played again, and sometimes there is even a third or a fourth time before the teacher’s patience gives out and before the teacher provides the students with correct answers and then gives the routine advice to practice more after class. Such listening comprehension lessons are by no means effective ways to radically improve the student listening proficiency in that they give no instruction as to how to go about listening, but just tell the students’ listening ability. What’s more, in college, limited classroom hours and the lack of scientific theories have given rise to the problems in listening teaching. In a listening class, the teacher usually plays a role as to simply play the tape recorder and check the students’ answers. The teacher occasionally explains some new words. After listening, the teacher will ask the students some questions. Therefore, students usually assume passive role in the listening class. This kind of test-oriented listening teaching depresses the atmosphere and the feelings of students.
Therefore, to promote more effective listening teaching and enable students to become more competent listeners, we need to research how to improve college students’ listening competence with the help of the problems’ analysis and the formats on listening teaching, and to re-examine the listening teaching style and seriously think about what should be taught to the students in the listening classes.

2. Some theories concerning English listening

2.1 The definition of listening
As an invisible mental process, different people give different definitions about listening. In the opinion of Michael Rost (2002) in Teaching Listening Comprehension,every definition of listening has some unique aspects. The definition of listening can be understood in four orientations, the receptive, the constructive, the collaborative and the transformative. In Underwood’s (1989, cited in Dunkel, 1991) understanding, listening is “the activity of paying attention to and trying to get meaning from something we hear”. In simple way to students, listening means catching what the speaker says. Michael’s definition of listening is that listening is experiencing contextual effect. Different experts also offer other listening definitions. Thomlison’s (1984) definition of listening includes “active listening,” which goes beyond comprehending literally to an empathetic understanding of the speaker. Hirsch (1986) groups definitions as attempts to define the process; explanations of sequential phases in listening; how sound is received, comprehended, and acted upon. Ronald and Roskelly (1985) define listening as an active process requiring the same skills of prediction, hypothesizing, checking, and revising. As an English teacher, the author believes that listening is the language skill that students acquire. Listening, which plays a life-long role in the process of communication, provides a foundation for all language developments Some recent studies describe listening as an active process in which listeners select and interpret information that comes from auditory and visual clues in order to define what is going on and what the speakers are trying to express .

2.2 The Audio-Lingual Method
The Audio-lingual Method which based on structuralism became popular in the 1950s. It argues that listening itself was nothing but a process of passive “decoding”, in which the listener “find equivalents” in his own language system for the words, phrases and sentences he hears. Listening is defined as the listener’s ability to recognize the language structure when he hears something “a satisfactory listening ability is the foundation of speaking.”
Compared with the past pedagogy, this approach further exposed the relationship between listening and pronunciation so that it created many new ways of practice on phonemes and single sentences to improve the listener’s listening and at the same time emphasized that oral English practice must be supported with plenty of listening materials. However, the Audio-lingual Method had a very limited understanding of listening. Jack C R. and Theodore S.R. (2000) point out that “Students were often found to be unable transfer skills acquired through Audiolingualisim to real communication outside the classroom, and man found the experience of studying through audio-lingual procedures to be boring and unsatisfying.”

2.3 Tasked-based Listening
Tasked-based Listening is an activity which requires learners to arrive at an outcome from being given information through some process of thought, and which allows teachers to control and regulate that process. Or it is an activity or action which is carried out as the result of processing or understanding language. For example drawing a map while listening to an instruction and performing a command, may be referred to as tasks. Tasks may or may not involve the production of language. A task usually requires the teacher to specify what will be regarded as successful completion of the task. The use of different kinds of tasks in language teaching is said to make language teaching snore communicative since it provides a purpose for a classroom activity which goes beyond the practice of language for its own sake. Any classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than form. The task should also have a sense of completeness, being able to stand alone as a communicative act in its own right.
To sum up, task could be defined basically as follow: a task is an activity that requires learners to use the target language, with meaning at the core, to achieve an objective.

3. Three problems in listening learning and the Solutions

3.1 Problems in listening materials

3.1.1 Lack various listening materials
Most college students have a background knowledge obstacle. Background knowledge is made up of cultural and topic background knowledge, which are factors that affect listening comprehension. Culture reflected in language. Nowadays, in college, most listening materials are written before and relate to some stories, which were designed by someone. There are seldom different kinds of materials which have various topics. Thus, most students can’t understand listening materials of certain difficult degree, especially about science, psychics and physiology, which have too many technical terms.
Although to do more listening is an active means of improving one’s listening ability. Listening ability is not completely determined by the times students do listening practice or the lengths and difficulty degrees of what they listen to. Listening, which is not an isolated language skill, is not only connected and affected by speaking, reading and writing, but also is the integrated reflection of one's knowledge of English.

3.1.2 Old and unauthentic materials
In college listening teaching, many listening materials used today are unauthentic and not suitable for the students and for listening teaching indeed. Teachers often use the recorded materials of written language. These materials are usually extracted from some written prose with standard English lack of the characteristics of spoken language and are difficult to understand. And listening comprehension exercises are usually prepared in advance and read aloud by the teacher or on the tape, which obviously does not provide the land of practice needed. Many books of listening exercises often consist of passages originally composed as written texts. Students listen to the text without any idea of what they are going to hear or what they are listening for, and then they have to answer comprehension questions, usually multiple-choice. This is a convenient classroom technique, which does provide a certain type of practice—but it does not provide any realistic preparation for real-life listening. Students getting used to this kind of slow and clear English find it hard to communicate with English native speakers in real-life listening, because they often fail to follow the rate of speech and to understand the idioms, slang and locutions used by native speakers. Although some can get high marks in listening test, they still find it rather difficult to catch what native speakers say and even more difficult to talk with them face to face.

3.1.3 Unrealistic listening materials
The contents of the listening materials often lose contact with the reality and with some specific situation; and the words are usually written by the teachers instead of coming from the authentic and natural language in real life, which is unfavorable to improving students’ listening ability it cannot be denied that there is a certain amount of spontaneous teacher-talk in class, much of which provides incidental listening practice. Although they do much such listening practice, a learner relying on such type of exercises is likely to have great difficulties in understanding native speech in natural communicative situations. Nevertheless, “it is not enough to base classroom exercises only on an imitation of reality. We must also take into account the specific difficulties faced by the foreigner i