The teachers often speak of the four skills-listening, speaking, reading and writing. That means each of them is important. You can’t say that you have mastered the language without any one of them. Listening, one of the means of language communication, is used most widely in people’s daily lives. About 45% of an adult’s time concerns listening to other people, listening to the radio, listening to the music.
In linguistics, giving the students a lot of listening activities is a good way of enlarging their vocabulary. On the other hand, it also helps the students improve their listening comprehension. I have done an investigation. About 43.2% of the students think that the most bothering and most difficult is listening comprehension, and even some of them have difficulty in understanding their teacher who gives lessons in English.
Without question, it is difficult of a middle school student to understand the listening material, if he hasn’t enough vocabulary and the ability of telling the grammar construction. In my investigation, about 35% of the students with low listening comprehension think this is because they don’t understand or know the knowledge about linguistic, they are not able to tell the means of what they have heard. In my another investigation, students were asked to listen to a dialogue of 244 words, in which the words and grammar have already been learned, but 80% of them thought iit was too difficult. Then, using the same dialogue as a reading comprehension material, I found only 5% of them thought it was a little difficult, on the other hand the response ability is also another reason.
It is clear that the reading speed of a material also effects. About 43% of the students thought that the material was read too fast and they couldn’t follow.
A lot of students have their own listening habits. Some students often tries 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.
Then how to improve the students’ listening skill?
We know the largest difference between mother language learning and foreign language learning is the environment. According to the First Language Acquisition, all children, given a normal developmental environment, acquire their native language fluently and efficiently; moreover, they acquire them naturally without special instruction, though not without notable conscious effort and attention to Language. So 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 walk and say, he has a chance of listening to more. Before he goes to school, he has already been a good listener and speaker.
But for a foreign language, you can meet it only in formal places, classes, for example, otherwise, you can hardly have a chance to meet it. So I think teachers try to let the students be in a language environment.
Let the students grasp the phonetic symbol. I think the phonetic symbol is the base. A good intonation and phonetic depends on the base. Oral reading after a radio or a teacher is a good way at the beginning, students should do much more about it.
Pay attention to the oral reading skills, 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.
Enlarge the students’ knowledge bout 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 difficulty. One explains something about China’ 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 the latter.
In a word, Teaching listening should focus on the process of listening rather than the result of listening. Listening activities should not merely test the students’ memory as amny traditional test-oriented listening exercises do. we believe a better understand of the listening process and the spoken language will help us teachers to understand thje difficulties that students experience in developing listening skills. It would also help us to design better listening activities for our students.
广东省珠海市前山中学 叶淑芳 |
