On Teaching Non-English Majors Listening And Speaking Through Videos

This is a study of the feasibility and effects of teaching listening and speaking with videos. The research is a part of the English Learning Program sponsored by Academic Affairs Office of Huazhong Agricultural University.In order to justify the application of this method from theoretical point of view, the author first gives a brief introduction to some related theories: the Input Hypothesis of Krashen, and Affective Hypothesis Context Theory and Communicative Language Teaching as well as the Schema Theory. They provide sufficient theoretic basis for this new method. According to Krashen's Input Hypothesis, the teacher should not only enable students to come into contact with large quantity of meaningful, interesting or relevant foreign language input materials but also provide them with low-affective filter learning environment. According to Motivation Theory, the learner's motivation plays an important in their language acquisition. It is very vital for a language teacher to come up with some ways to motivate students. Context theory emphasizes the importance of context in language teaching and learning. Beyond teaching linguistic forms, the teacher should cultivate students' ability to use language, especially the ability to use language accurately, appropriately and fluently in specific contexts. Communicative Language Teaching attaches much importance to cultivation of communicative competence in ELT. The Schema Theory accounts for the role of the learner's background knowledge in language comprehension.Then the author introduced a pilot study conducted by utilizing videos to teach listening and speaking from September 2002 till now. The statistical result from the experiment seems to suggest that there is indeed some correlation between teaching listening and speaking with videos and a learner's listening comprehension in general in language achievement tests at certain stages. The scores of students of theexperimental group are improved. (Final Test Band 1 and Mid-term Test Band 4)Analysis and discussions have been done based on a questionnaire of 18 items and the interview involving 10 open-ended questions. The result showed that both the teachers and students had positive attitudes towards teaching listening and speaking with videos. Most of them view this method as an effective way in ELT teaching because it provides more opportunities for contextual practice, lower their anxiety; it can also motivate them, stimulate their active participation and increase their activities as well. Therefore this method can cultivate students' communicative competence.Consequently, we can tentatively draw the conclusion that this method has some advantages over teaching listening and speaking with the pre-taped materials in New College English. It may play an important role in ELT teaching, especially in listening and speaking teaching.Based on the statistical analyses and the survey, some activities and techniques are provided for the teacher on how to teach listening and speaking with videos. The roles that an English teacher plays in this method are illustrated at the end of the paper.