How to Improve English listening Ability

Language is a means of Communication . Listening is an important Step of communication. English teaching is aimed at training students’ ability to apply the language, listening is the basic and the most direct link in acquiring information. Besides, Having a good listening not only can meet the social development，but also can meet students’ development. So cultivation of Students’ listening ability should be put into the first place in the process of English teaching.

But, according to years of teaching experience, I find many students don’t know how to listen to English at the beginning. Gradually, their listening becomes worse and worse. Where do the problems exist? How to solve the problems? All of these deserve our Consideration. This paper discusses the present situation of English listening and the detailed discussion about listening strategy.

一、Present situation influencing listening

Listening teaching is always a weaker link in English teaching . It’s weakened or ignored. Few teachers have a special listening class that can fit in with the actual listening teaching class. The reasons that cause the situation above are as follows:

1. Force from the stress into higher schools

For a long period, English teaching puts particular emphasis on written exercises , reading comprehension under the stress from the exam results. Those exercises are repeated again and again, which results in students’ passively learning language and makes lots of students lose their interest in learning English.

The goal for students to study English, in fact, is to be able to express themselves, to communicate with others and to get along with others. Spoken English seems to be more important than written English, but it must be based on listening. That’s to say, you cannot communicate with people very well unless you can acquire what the other carries as exactly as possible.

2. Guidance from wrong ideas

Many people have a wrong understanding that listening ability is acquired by nature instead of depending on teachers’ training and cultivation. As a result，the training and cultivation of listening ability can’t be put into practice.

Depending on effective training methods, students can get more complete and more correct language information so that students’ English level can be improved as a whole.

3. Drive from traditional teaching.

Driven by traditional teaching model and methods, most of teachers still pay great attention to how to have students master grammar successfully, and how to improve students’ reading and writing ability, ignoring the training and the cultivation of listening ability. What’s worse,they think listening teaching not only is a waste of time and energy, but also has no obvious results. So they still consider the key to English teaching to be text teaching, grammar teaching and unit tests and so on. Ｔhe basic listening teaching is replaced by the standard exercises for tests.

二、Listening practicing strategy

1) Practicing phonetics and intonation

Good mastering of phonetics and intonation is basic for improving listening. Different pronunciations make different meaning. So phonetic and intonation practicing is indispensable. The students should pay attention to sentence stress, word syllable, strong form, weak form and plosive consonant and intonation. To some extent, we may guess the meaning according to phonetics and intonation.

2) Intensive listening

Intensive listening means that you should understand well the materials you choose. In other words, you should hear every word, every sentence clearly, no matter how many times you use. The general method of intensive listening is: first time, you listen to it form the beginning to the end, just having a general understanding of the material. Second tome, you should listen to it from one sentence to another sentence. If you don’t understand it, you can go back till you understand. If you came across new words, you can use dictionaries or other tools. In addition, you can also write every sentence when you hear.

3)Exclusive listening

At the same time, we should also adopt exclusive listening. You can’t stop the recorder when you want. During listening, your main task is to grasp the main idea. You don’t need to hear every word clearly. It emphasizes on the whole text not every word. Do not stop on new words or words which you do not understand. If you can, just pass it .Also you should know how to guess. Do not be nervous just guess it bravely.

4)Practicing method

In a listening test, the content is new. Therefore the students will become nervous when they have their papers. Prereading and predicting will help students to become familiar with the content. It also can make them calm down.

As we know, communication is related with context. At school, the conversations are between teachers and students, who always talk about study, exams, and exercises; In hospital, the conversations are between doctors, nurses and patients. The content is about illness and health. If you get some information, you can predict the speaker’s role and the content.

Before listening, students should preread the questions and choices .For example, a lot of materials begin with “wh-question”, so we need to emphasize on the content of wh-question. If you connect the main words together , you will get the basic clues and plots of the conversation. Sometimes you can guess the right answers without listening.

４) Nurturing students’ note-taking ability

Some students said that they could understand most of the material. But they always forgot what they heard when they listened to the late part. So the students should know how to take notes.

a. Rephrasing sentences for note-taking

Taking good notes requires you to be able to do two things very quickly: First, you must recognize main topics; second, you must be able to write down as many details and supporting examples as you hear and understand. In other words, your hand must work as quickly as your ear. Just like sending a telegram, we must rephrase briefly. For example:

“I will be arriving tomorrow, Monday, April 15, on TWA flight number 222, at JFK airport.”

When you take notes, you have similar problems. In this case, it is time that is limited. Therefore, it is a good idea to practice listening only for the most important words in those sentences.

b. Using abbreviations

Using abbreviations and symbols can save a lot of time and effort. The symbols you use must make sense to you, but it is not necessary for anyone else to be able to understand them. Note-taking is a very individual skill. The main point to remember is to use only abbreviations, which you will be able to remember when revising your notes some time later. Sometimes using Chinese is more convenient than using English. For example, you can use “国” in place of “National Day” or “妇” in place of “Women’s Day” and so on.

三、Some aspects that students must pay attention to

1. Listening in class is not enough

Listening in class is just for intensive listening. After class, the students should seize the opportunity to listen to English news and some other materials in order to practice listening especially for exclusive listening. For example, VOA and BBC are very good materials for exclusive listening. Besides, you can watch some simple but interesting English movies to discover the amusement while practicing listening. Finally, remember: reading by yourself and listening to what you read is also a good way to improve your listening because you can hear what you read when you read

2. Do not use intensive listening and exclusive listening separately

For listening, students firstly must learn exclusive listening, grasping the main ideas. But exclusive listening cannot improve your listening and just good listeners can use it. Some materials are needed to listen intensively, such as time, places, the characters and so on. It can help you understand each detail. Both of these two kinds of listening are useful for us.

3. Read as widely as possible

Vocabulary is also one of the important factors that have a large effect on listening, so students should enlarge their amount of vocabulary by reading as widely as possible so that they can have a better understanding of listening materials. Besides, reading widely can help understand the background of American and English cultures. If you can not understand the potential cultural differences between the western countries and the Eastern countries, the obstacle will appear during the process of listening. What is more, reading can practice hearing. The language sense is to cultivate through reading.