HowtoImprovetheStudents.doc

How to Improve the Students’ English Listening in Primary School

Cong Chunyun

Supervisor

Professor Wang Zhaojun

School of Second Normal College of Jiangsu

Date

Contents

Abstract.............................................................................. 1
Key words............................................................................................ 1
Chapter One Literature Review .......................................... 3
Chapter Two The Importance of Improving Primary School Students’ Listening
1.1 The Current Situation of English Listening Teaching....... 5
1.2 The Importance Of Improving Listening............................ 7

Chapter Three The Influential Factors of English Listening Teaching
2.1 Lack of Teaching Instrument................................................. 7
2.2 Language Barrier in Listening.............................................. 8
2.2.1 Barrier of Phonetics................................................... 9
2.2.2 Lack of Listening Comprehension........................... 10
2.2.3 Lack of Vocabulary and Knowledge of Grammar.. 10
2.3 Non-language Barrier in Listening....................................... 11
2.3.1 The Cultural Differences between Countries.......... 11
2.3.2 the Psychological Factors.......................................... 12

Chapter four The Efficient Teaching Methods for Improving Listening in Primary School
3.1 The Application of SRT Model.............................................. 13
3.2 The Application of MI Theory............................................... 16
3.3 Stimulating the Students’ Interest in Listening.................. 17
3.4 Increasing the Knowledge of Vocabulary ............................ 18
Conclusion...............................................................................................20
References ..............................................................................................21

I

Abstract
The education of Primary School is the enlightenment of the whole English teaching and basic stage. Among the five basic English learning skills（listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating), listening, dominant and important, comes first which is a bond to another four skills. The impact of the effective ways of teaching listening is related to set up the deep foundation and arouse the interest of English learning in Primary School. However, according to the current situation of teaching listening in Primary School, especially the English teaching in primary school in rural areas, the fact that there are several un-negligible problems in it need taking into account. Therefore, how to deal with the problems and improve the students’ leaning in Primary School?
Key Words: enlightenment, basic English learning skills, current situation

摘要
小学教育在整个英语教学中处于启蒙阶段和基础阶段。在五项基本技能即听，说，读，写，译中，听力居于首位，可见其在英语教学中的主导地位和重要性。同时，也是连接其它四项基本技能的桥梁。有效的听力教学与打好根深蒂固的英语基础以及提升英语学习的兴趣密不可分。但是，从当前的听力教学来看，仍然存在着一些不可忽视的问题, 尤其是在农村小学英语教学中。因此，如何才能解决这些问题和提高小学英语听力的教学呢?
关键词：启蒙，基本技能，现状

How to Improve the Students’ English Listening in Primary School

Chapter One Literature Review
Listening, as the leader in the five basic learning skills, plays an important role in English teaching. Since 1970s, many experts home and abroad who study the language acquisition have explained the relationships among cognitive information processing theory, strategies and language materials.
According to Anderson’s cognitive theory, O'Malley and Chamot (1990) divide the learning strategies into meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social strategies based on the cognitive information processing theory, which is more than complete and representative and adopted by the researchers all over the world. What’s more, this division has offered many practical and meaningful learning skills as well as promote the development of English listening teaching.
As Qian Yilin mentioned in her book, in Kenneth’s opinion (1976), the key point of listening is listening comprehension, which contains five parts: discrimination、perception of message、auditory memory、decoding message as well as using or storing message and whose process is that of decoding. As we all know, listening is one of the main means to get the information from the outside world, a listener not only receiving and comprehending the messages, but also decoding the coded messages from a speaker, which is the process of decoding.
According to He xin and Yang Haowei, Stereotypical Relations Teaching Model (SRT Model), aimed at the English listening teaching in rural area, refers to setting up relations between listening and English pronunciation、words、sentences as well as relative topics in English learning. The theme basis of SRT Model is phonetics. Based on phonetics、vocabulary、syntax and non-language factors, SRT Model can be divided into four specific models that are Phonetic Alphabet Teaching Model, Lexical Teaching Model, Sentence and Grammar Teaching Model, Non-Language Factors Teaching Model.
In Li Ying’s On the Application of MI Theory to English Listening Teaching in Primary Schools, Howard Gardner, an American psychologist at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, first introduced Multiple Intelligence theory (MI theory) in his book Frames of Mind in 1983, where he introduced nine intelligence of humans. They are Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence, Logical-Mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence, Musical Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelligence, Intrapersonal Intelligence, Naturalist Intelligence,and Existential Intelligence.
According to MI theory, people can be divided into three types. The first type is who have the most of the nine intelligence in their working like scientists and politicians, sometimes who we call as a genius. The second type is who have none of the intelligence, someone who is like idiot. The third type the most of ordinary people belong to is who has one or two developed intelligence.
With those teaching theories done by the authoritative educational experts, the educational system of English teaching has achieved a lot of improvement, especially the SRT model which, to a great extent, has solved the problems in primary school in the rural areas. What’s more, those theories do contribute to improving the shortage of English teaching.
Chapter Two The Significance of Improving Listening

The Current Situation of Primary School Students’ Listening
English listening teaching plays an important role in primary school, which contributes to improve the integrate competence in language usage and gets the English teachers’ a lot of attention. However, according to the current situation of English listening teaching, most teachers have the mistaken opinions towards how to carry it out, including the way to warm up, the presentation of the new words and the arrangement of the activities.
Warming-up is not only one of the major ways to arouse the students’ interest in English learning, but also the key to listening teaching in order to adjust pre-listening attitude, to know the topics well, to get the background information and the specific tasks. Therefore, in this section, teachers should choose the best way to warm up in terms of making a lively learning atmosphere, such as listening to songs, free talk and brainstorm.
In the teaching of English listening, teachers have to deal with the new words. But when to deal with and how to deal with are the problems that confuses the teachers all the time. A few teachers who think that as long as the students completely master the meaning of the new words and they can learn the text well, spend too much time dealing with the words in the period of pre-listening. While this teaching method don’t help the students jump over the obstacles, not as the teachers have expected. To some extent, it loses the value and meaning of teaching of English listening.
The arrangement of the activities is too simple and single, which is easy to reduce the students’ attention and interest. Sometimes, the activities are designed out of the students’ capability. Even after listening for many times, the students still don’t know what the conversation or the text is talking about. In this part, what the teachers easily ignore are the aims of those activities as well as the difficulty.

The Importance of Improving listening.
The education in Primary School is the enlightenment of the whole English teaching and basic stage. Among the five basic English learning skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating, listening comes first, dominant and important, which is a bond to the other four skills and is the major way to get the information, to learn the study materials, to improve the language learning.
As we all know, listening and speaking are the basic forms in daily communication. As Fries said, to students, the premise of learning English is listening. Alexander also said that if you want master a language, the first thing to do is listening. From these, we know that listening is so important in English learning. However, the English listening teaching in our country still has potential problems that needs improving so that the development of students’ study can be improved.

Chapter Three The Major Factors of English Listening
Here are several factors influencing on the listening ability that need taking into account, mainly in external barriers and internal barriers in listening.

Lack of Teaching equipment
In most areas, especially in the rural and poor areas, the schools have to face the financial problems as they can’t afford the basic equipment, such as tape recorders and computer assistant instruction (CAI). Without those teaching assistant stuff, it’s difficult to curry out the listening teaching for the only the way to learn is listening to the teachers. Students have a little chance to hear the standard English, in a result, their English, especially the pronunciation, is not as the native speakers’ whose mother language is English. Therefore, these students’ listening skills can’t get improved. In order to give the students in rural areas a better learning environment, the government and social charities institution should take some actons like donating money for them, and sending some professional English teachers to these areas.

Language Barriers in Listening
Generally speaking, English listening is a process that brains make a response to what they have heard, sensitively and actively. During this process, the listener tries to understand what the speaker really mean, with the clue given by a certain information and social, cultural and linguistic knowledge commanded. The major barrier of listening comprehension is language barrier.

u The barrier of phonetics
Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language: it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world’s languages. The problems caused by the phonetics is that students can’t distinguish the phonetic sound between words and don’t know which one is right. For example among the four words (with, then, clothes and month), students are asked to find out the one different from the other three. Many students will be confused because they can’t tell the difference between /θ/ and /ð/. Another example is dictation. In this part, the students are asked to fill in the blanks with the given information. The fact is that one of the blanks should be “sing”, while most students write “see”. This is a common phenomenon in listening examination.
What can we do to avoid it happening again? Here are two main strategies. One is the teachers should pay more attention to the acquisition of phonetics, especially the international phonetic alphabet and ask students to spend more time practicing how to pronounce the 48 alphabets correctly. After class or school, teacher can assign some tasks like listening to stories and then read them out, which is better way to improve students’ listening and speaking. The other is, in listening teaching, teachers can guide students to the phonetic change, such as phonetic assimilation and liaison like “ a cup of tea” and “ take it out”.

u Lack of listening comprehension
To a great extent, listening examination is aimed at testing the students’ comprehension towards the sentence and the whole text and making the right decision and inferring according to the materials. However, some students tend to pay their attention to every single word and sentence during the listening and are not good at grasping the relative information about the text. As a result, the students can’t catch the main idea of the whole text. Some students are inclined to find out the meaning of the new words they hear, which is kind of waste of time and easy to lose the important information. With the broken information and English, the students have no time to understand the whole passage.
To this phenomenon, the teachers can ask students not to write the answer when they listen to the dialogue or passage at the first time. When they listen at the second time, the teachers can guide students in guessing what the text is mentioned about. Then at the third time, it’s time to write and check the answers. Take this way and practice a lot, the abilities of students’ listening comprehension will be improved.

u Lack of the knowledge of English grammar
Although listening materials are mainly oral English, the command of basic English grammar is necessary. We have to know what the real meaning the speaker want to express according to the tense, the subjunctive mood, passive voice and comparative degree in the dialogue. For instance, the sentence “I can’t agree with you more”. When you see this sentence at first, you may think it means that I can’t agree with you any more. However, the right meaning of this sentence is I completely agree with you.
Therefore, in listening teaching, the teachers should offer students some knowledge of grammar, which is good for you to understand the sentence and real meaning of the speaker’s words.

Non-language Barrier in Listening
Non-language barrier refers to the barrier that influences on the listening comprehension, which includes the current knowledge, the effect of cultural difference, life style and the view of the value and person and psychological factors.

u The Enormous Cultural difference between the two countries.
As we all know that the language is the carrier of the culture. As English learners learn the language, they need to know and learn more about the cultural background knowledge and phonetics. If the listeners lack of the knowledge of differ