On Development of Students' Listening in Class

Abstract：Listening is considered to be one of the most difficult skills in English learning. And it is obvious that the learners do not have enough and effective listening practice in a scientific way. This thesis will focus on listening. The author mainly analyzes how to develop the listening strategies to improve the ability of listening comprehension.

Key words：Listening；Student；Teacher

中图分类号：H319 文献标识码： A 文章编号：1672-1578（2013)03-0016-01

1 Introduction

Listening is a very important part of English teaching and learning. Even you can speak English fluently, but that is one side of communication. The other is listening. The degree of listening can be divided into three levels approximately. The basic level is to get the general meaning of the conversation. That is what is the mainly about, which is the primary degree. The second is to well understand the conversation and at the same time give out the correct response, which is the middle degree. The third is the highest level that is to have the pretty good command of the statement and use native aphorism to show personal idea clearly. Nowadays, it is hardly necessary to argue the importance of listening training in English language classes. However, English teachers are still in search of effective approaches for teaching listening comprehension. From this point, the question is not whether or not listening is an important linguistic skill, it is what both teachers and students should do to improve it.

2 Students’ Role

2.1 Being Active Listeners

Usually, listening is always considered as a “passive” or “receptive” skill. The image conjured up by these terms is of the learner-as-sponge, passively absorbing the aural signals. An active listener knows how to use imagination to predict the content of the title, to listen for selected information, to activate their prior knowledge and life experience to take in new knowledge. The way of making the students as active learners is to set a clear purpose before listening, assign some tasks for the students while they are listening to the text.

2.2 Understanding Nature of Listening

One of the wrong ideas the students have in their minds is that: Successful listening comprehension is total comprehension. They don’t believe they can become a good listener with less than 100% perception and/or understanding of what is said. They don’t realize even in their native language, they would never require themselves to do so. They overemphasize the dealing with individual word, not the intended meanings of the language and the related content schema the language carries. So the teacher should comfort the students not to worry about the unknown words, they can guess the new words from context, from the content or script schema in a particular situation.

3 Teacher’s Role

3.1 Selecting Suitable Listening Materials for Students

Chinese students do not have enough chances to communicate with the native English speakers. The learning resources for listening mainly come from tapes, VCD, films recorded in English. The contents of the listening texts should be interesting and familiar to the listeners, and it is even better to use the real events in life, such as the news stories.

3.2 Developing Students’ Listening Strategies

3.2.1 Guessing New Words from Context

It is unavoidable for the students to come across some new words in the listening text. Usually, they would tend to stop listening and think about the meanings of the unknown words. However, the speaker will not stop and the students may miss the next part of the utterance. In fact the students needn’t worry too much about the new words, if they keep pace with the speaker’s thinking process. They can manage to get the meaning after finishing the listening piece. They can try the following ways:1) Guessing the unknown words from synonyms and antonyms；2) Guessing unknown word from the contextual clues.

Of course, we should not expect to guess all the unknown words in a listening text. Anyway, the most important thing is to understand the information that the utterances have transferred, not the individual word.

3.2.2 Finding Main Idea

Some students say they cannot have a global

understanding of what they have heard. They can only catch some words or phrases. That’s to say they cannot see the wood for the trees, not catch the main idea of the text. A main idea is a point, a general statement the speaker makes about anything. In fact, the main idea statement of listening pieces can be placed at the beginning, or in the middle or at the end of a piece; and sometimes, the listeners have to make inference to catch it according to the logical thinking.

3.2.3 Predicting

How do we predict in listening?

1) Predict the content of the topic of the listening piece

2) Use the signal words to make prediction

3) Prediction based on the,idioms, quotations, and proverbs

3.2.4 Taking Notes

Some students often find that they cannot concentrate on the listening to the passage and some cannot remember the content they have heard. To solve these two problems, taking notes is an effective way. Of course, how to take notes depends on the individual’s language competence and the quality of memory. The listeners should develop their own ways that are most effective and suitable to themselves.

4 Conclusion

Listening is one of the essential skills in the learning of English, but it hasn’t drawn enough attention in the teaching of English at many schools in China. Listening class is considered as a simple job to play the tape and check the answers. It’s high time for the teachers to think about how to improve the teaching of English listening and enhance the students’ ability of listening. Of course, student should also play their role as confident and active learner.

Bibliography：

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