Listening Teaching Strategies Of VOA Special English Based On Relevance Theory

The ability of listening comprehension is an important factor to measure the integrative competence of the language learners. And the ability of listening comprehension can influence the language learners'development of other language skills. However, the public English teaching in our country especially the listening comprehension teaching in higher vocational college still follows the traditional teaching model:Listening to the records—checking the answers—comparing with the original tapescripts—listening to the records again. The listening materials used in the textbook of higher vocational college are rarely involve the news report and most of the materials are old and tedious. The improvement of the students' listening comprehension ability is relatively slow under the instruction of traditional teaching model. Meanwhile, the traditional teaching model also restrict the improve of the English language ability of the higher vocational college students.According to the condition, the author examines the listening comprehension teaching class of the higher vocational college and finds the actual problems:The students are unfamiliar with the background information about the listening materials; They do not know how to make inferences according to the specific contexts; The selected listening materials can not arouse the students interest; We need an effective teaching model in listening comprehension class. In order to solve the actual teaching problems, the author designs a new teaching model which based on the relevance and schema theory. This new teaching model concentrates on activating the existing schema and building the new schema in order to make the students rapidly familiar with the listening material in pre-listening stage. Then in while-listening stage the author guides the students to make inferences within the news features and the specific context. In the post-listening stage, the author arranges the students to have group discussion about the news and make conclusion about the whole listening process. The author aims to answer the following two research questions according to the practical teaching process:1) Whether the listening teaching of VOA Special English based on relevance and schema theory can improve students'listening scores and abilities? 2) If the teaching method can improve the scores, what are the effective ways?Based on these theories, the author carried out a two-month teaching experiment to sixty students who were non-English majors in Liaoning University of International Business and Economics. The students came from two natural classes, and the author divided them into experimental class and control class. The students from control class received the traditional teaching model while in the experimental class the students received the new teaching model which based on relevance and schema theory. All the students have been tested by a pre-test and a post-test, and the results had been analyzed by SPSS software. The results showed that the new teaching model helped the students to improve their listening scores. In order to prove the research more effective and reliable, the author handed out two sets of questionnaires and arranged an interview with 10 students. Because of the short period of practical teaching, there must be many drawbacks in the research design. The author hopes the thesis can be a help to the listening comprehension teaching of the higher vocational college...