How to Improve Students Listening skillAbstract/ The purpose of middle school students foreign language study is to train the ability of listening/ Speaking/ reading and writing/ and in these several language skills/ listening is often neglected in language teaching/ moreover/ listening can be more difficult than others/ the foreign teacher should pay more attention to how to improve students listening skills/ This article starts with talking about the listening process/ then analysis the cause of the problems that restrict the students listening/ e/g/ being weak in sound and vocabulary influence the listening ability/ the sentence structure and content keeps from listening etc/ Finally discuss on how to improve their listening skill/ Nowadays/ many students feel it difficult to improve their listening and dont know to cope with these problem/ ways are suggested in this article/Key words/ listening comprehension/ problems/ listening skills摘 要：中学生外语学习的主要目的是培养听、说、读、写能力，而这几种语言技能中，听力常常被忽略，且听力较其它三种技能更难。在教学过程中，外语老师更应注重怎样有效地提高学生的听力技能。本文首先谈到的是听力过程，然后分析了制约学生听力理解的普遍问题，如语音、词汇差异影响了英语听力的理解和提高，句子结构及内容的难度阻碍英语听力的理解等等，现在许多学生觉得听力是最难的，但不知如何解决这些听力问题，所以外语老师更应在教学过程中有效地提高他们的听力技能，本文对此做出一些阐述。关键词：听力理解；问题；听力技能ContentsContents iAbstract iiIntroduction11/ Listening Processes22/Problems in Listening42/1 General problems42/1/1 Problems caused by learning habits42/2 Specific problems52/2/1 Sound52/2/2 Vocabulary72/2/3 Sentence structure 82/2/4 The main idea or inferring92/2/5 Contexts102/2/6 Lacking concentrate123/Methods of Solution123/1 Selecting suitable texts for listening133/2 Design listening activities for the classroom143/2/1 Pre-listening stage153/2/2 While-listening stage163/2/3 Post-activities163/3 Building students confidence18Conclusion18Bibliography20Acknowledgement21Introduction With the improvement of the economic situation in China/ English is playing greater importance for English learners/ So more and more foreign language teachers have been be concerned with developing students listening ability/ Now Chinese students who have studied English may be able to read and write the language successfully/ but they do not always know how to improve their listening well/ Nowadays/ they fully understand that the successful communication with others in English based on being able to listen and understand/ especially some students who want go abroad/ If they do not learn to listen effectively/ they will be unable to take part in oral communication/ Therefore/ to improve students listening ability ，teacher should find ways to improve their listening skills in teaching course/ At the same time/ many English learners pay more and more attention to how to improve their listening ability so that they can read English effectively and talk with foreigners fluently/ In the view of the fact/ I would like to express my opinion about the listening/ First/ the article will be made first to discuss the listening process and then analysis students listening obstacles caused by various problems in middle school/ the effective solution to deal with these problems that students have with listening process in teaching course/ This article will help student to develop effective listening skills in the middle school/1/ Listening Processes Among the four skills (listening/ speaking/ reading and writing)/ many foreign language learners often complain that listening is the most difficult to acquire/ Therefore/ we need first to understand what happens when we listen/ and have a better of understanding process/ Mary under wood (1989) points out that the listening process consists of three stages/ 1 At the first stage/ the sounds go into a sensory store/ often called the “echoic” memory/ and are organized into meaningful units/ according to the knowledge of the language the listener already has/ At the second stage/ words or grasp of words are checked and compared with information already held in the long term memory and the meaning is extracted from them/ At the third stage/ after the listener has constructed a meaning from the utterance which may on may not be the meaning that was intended by the speaker/ he or she might transfer the information to the long term memory for the later use/ It is obvious that generally a listener who wants to do in the processing activities/ and construct a meaningful message in their mind by relating what we hear and have enough previous knowledge of what is being said/ then regained the information and stored it rely on the long term memory/ in the processing listening/ It seems that the listening is not at all passive/ The problem is that each of the three stages happens within very short seconds/ The sound disappears very quickly and do not have enough time to receive the related information so it is difficult to make sense of what is said/ and students will fail to figure out the meaning from what they have heard/ However/ the above stages are not enough on their own to explain the process of listening comprehension/ In addition/ it contains other process which is different from the reading process/ “listeners are not simply passive processor who undertake automatic signal recognition exercises as acoustic signals are fed into them and so construct a meaning”/ “As soon as someone/ begin to speak/ the co-operative human listener is actively trying to work out what he is saying/ what he is likely to say next and what he is likely to mean by what he says/ The active listener will use all relevant background knowledge-knowledge of the physical context of the utterance(the immediate surroundings/ the place/ the time of day/ etc)/ knowledge of the speaker (gender/ age/ know opinions/ knowledge of the topic and what the speaker is likely to know about it or fed about it)/ and so on/ Armed with all this activated knowledge the listener monitors the incoming acoustic signal/ which will simultaneously shape and confirm his expectation/2 It seems that the term top-down and down-up have used to describe the different aspect of listening/ In the bottom up part of the listening process/ we use our knowledge of language and our ability to process acoustic sing/ while Top-down comprehension involve knowledge that a listener brings to a text/ The foreign language learner want to succeed in listening comprehension/ they should understand very well the process/ If the English learners have a better understand the processes behind these listening situations/ they will develop good listening habits and a high level of proficiency in English/2/ Problems in Listening2/1 General problems2/1/1 Problems caused by learning habitsForeign language learners/ including students in middle school/ they all have problems in listening and find listening tend to be more difficult than other three skills/ Whether come from city or the rural areas/ it hinders seriously the development of students ability to listening effectively/ In addition/ because of the old traditional class teaching approach/ they prefer to master the form of language rather than understand how to use it/ and their learning attitude is too passive/ They hope the teacher explain all the important point in the listening process/ whereas having no idea about guessing the difficult words concerning the materials/ So they tend to fail to understand the gist of the passage or phrase will be worried and lack confidence/Moreover/ due to their learning conditions in the countryside/ the English teachers have a lower quality in teaching English language in the middle school/ In particular， their English pronunciation have a strong accent which hinders understanding of standard English/ In the traditional listening text/ the listening comprehension questions only text the students but do not train the students how to listen/ even they almost never had English listening classes/ Thus/ they easily become nervous and shy when exited in English examination/ some of them lack interesting in the English class/ and even others lose confidence the teacher/ So these problems are students obstacles in English text/ but they eager to learn how to master the listening ability/2/2 Specific problems In English learning experience in middle school/ many students find listening more difficult than the other three skills/ One reason for students poor listening skill is that listening is often neglected in teaching course/ other is lack of real-life situation where language learners need to understand spoken English/ etc/ To solve the students obstacle and help them to acquire the English listening ability/ thus the teacher should know their level and identify their problems lie in the processing listening/2/2/1 Sound Different English learners may produce the same sounds in different ways/ e/g/ dialects and accents/ stresses/ rhythms/ intonations/ mispronunciations/ etc/ 3 there may be caused by obstacles in listening process to some extent/ Also/ many students are never exposed to spoken English in rural areas/ so they didnt understand spoken English when they begin to listen/ They do not know that “consonants and vowels are combined to form words and utterances within a rhythmic structure/ Every consonant and every vowed will be affected by is neighboring consonant and every vowel will be occurred “they were taught to pronounce words clearly and slowly since the first day the begin to learn English/ and they were accustomed to this slow/ clear model in which each sentence is uttered as a sequence of readily identifiable word/”2 In the middle school/ they have little knowledge about the fact that the pronunciation of words undergoes changes in the stream of speech/ As a result/ they tend to fail to understand spoken English/ While failures to understand are usually caused by liaison/ which occurs in natural English language flow from tine to time/ and they tend to block students comprehension and often completely confuse them/ for example/Listening text/A/ Hello/ my name is Lily/ can I speak to Jane?B/ Oh/ Im sorry/ youve dialed the wrong number/ there be no Jane/ this is a hotel in America/Direction/ Listen to the dialogue carefully/ fill in the blacks with words/It is usually difficult for students to work out the word “hotel” in the last word/ The reason is that the last sound / l / in the word “hotel” and the first sound / I / in the word/ “In” undergo a case of liaison/ So students heard the sound is /h utelin// they fail to catch the exact word/ If it is pronounced in isolation/ it is understood with no difficult at all immediately/The patterns of assimilation and elision are common in listening/ they lead to the disappearance of word boundaries/ to omission of certain voles and consonant etc/ therefore/ students tend to fail notice in their listening and often caused problems in understanding/ In a word/ the above problems are quite-typical to students in the middle school/ they should be make the best to most of effects to overcome is so as to get good results/2/2/2 VocabularyAlthough students have learned a large number of vocabulary in their learning process/ they still will confront some difficult words concerning material while listening/ especially when the topic is not familiar/ they will have no ability to process the words in to meaning words for students/ when listening to a foreign language/ an unknown word will often make them stop suddenly and think about the meaning of the words so that they miss the next part of the speech/ In the middle school/ many English teachers taught them to give emphasis on accuracy rather than fluently/ This kind of teaching method makes them pay attention to the language word for word/ and blocks students listening ability and effects their the whole records/ By analyzing the language text carefully/ it almost becomes a collection of language points for them/ Moreover/ in the traditional listening classroom/ the listening question only text the students/ the teacher neglects how to train the students to develop effective listening skills in teaching press/ As a matter of the fact/ That bad habit which needs to be got rid of/ “Students need to develop the skill of keeping up with the speaker level being ahead of the speaker even this means letting go parts which they fail to sort out”12/2/3 Sentence structure In listening passage/ the English learners find longer sentence that is hard to understand for students in middle school/ owing to limitations on short term memory load/ Sometimes students fail to understand the listening text which caused by their unfamiliarity with the sentence structure/ For example/Listening text/A/ Hi/ Susan/ have you got any plans for the weekend?B/ No/ I have time to plan/ and you?A/ I am thinking of giving a party/ is Bill there?B/ Im sorry err/ hes out/ and can I take a message for you?A/ Well/ Im supposed to be meeting him at my home/ would you ask her to see if he has my book? And if he does/ tell him to bring it along/Q/ Why is (A) calling?A/ To invite Bill to dinner/B/ To borrow a book from Bill/C/ To ask Bill to return her Book/D/ To lend a book from Bill/To above question/ many students may choose A/ which suggests that they did not understand the meaning of the sentence/ “Im supposed to meeting him my home/” Indicate that the auction will take place according to the conversation/ one the meaning of this sentence structure had been explained/ they change to choose C/Even sometimes the sentence which is too long or the structure is so complex that they didnt make out the listening context/ especially in a news report or Broadcast/ But it is so difficult for students in middle school that is not to mention here/2/2/4 The main idea or inferringTo find out the main idea of the listening text is a difficult task for students in the middle school/ Because they must try to get a general idea of what they hear only finished in a short memory burden/ most students are confused by uncertainty of the answer/ when they finished the listening texts/ Doing the difficult task/ some students often make a wrong choice/ why this kind of task is difficult for students in the middle school? Because the students need to match what they hear/ then pick out the main idea/ Therefore it requires of the students the high amount of response/ and it requires the student to understand what message the speaker wants to come through the listening text/ but is blocked by their translation according to the way of mother tongue in the listening/ so they couldnt identify the main idea or the topic/One might lack of inadequate language proficiently/ or background knowledge/ it makes them find the main idea or topic difficult/ even it fails often due to their low level language/ So they sometimes do not understand the language they speak has produced/ For example/W/ John/ do you want to go swimming with me today?M/ Sure/ but I cant leave now/ I have an appointment wish my professor/ at three oclock?Q/ Why cant John go swimming now?1) He must meet his teacher/2) He must attend a class/3) He must go out with his girlfriend/4) He must stay at school to finish his homework/It is very usual phenomena that student often talk a bout the problem of appoint-time with their teacher in the American university/ If they have better understanding of background knowledge of dialogue or passage they have heard/ it is good to their further understanding even make up of their short of language/ Making inference is another difficult task for students because students especially these have just begun to learn to learn to listen/ tend to interpret each sentence/ As a result misunderstanding arises/For students whose level of foreign language proficiency is not very high/ it is difficult to understand something which is indirectly stated/ This is because “simply coping with the foreign language takes up so much of their processing capacity that they do not perform normal inference on the discourse/ 32/2/5 Contents Learners who are unfamiliar with the background knowledge required to make senses of a text will experience difficulty in interpreting and inferring meaning/ 4In order to understand the content/ we need to know something/ Such as the conventions surrounding a university life/ The language is not likely to cause problems but a lack of certain knowledge may well do so/ The major implication here for teaching listening is the need for a pre-listening stage in which existing prior knowledge can be activated and listening prior knowledge can be introduced/However/ owing to their uncertainties of context/ the main reason is their failure to deanery the signals in the listening text/ there are many words and phrased which speakers may use to indicate that they are illustrating their ideas by giving examples/ or expressing their relationships or introducing definition/ etc/ these words and phrases are served as signal for the meaning and structure of the text/ are easily missed by students therefore/ they fail to make out the general idea of the content fully such as therefore since but so that “To show us the cause and effective relationship between one idea and another of course/ A speaker may make use of panes to show he/she is beginning a new point/ or use voices/ and attention wandering is understandable/ Unsuitable classroom circumstances ran also make concentration difficult/ fo
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