An Empirical Study On Building Multi-dimensional Model Of Listening For English Majors

The thesis reports a study on the factors, which affect LC (listening comprehension) from three aspects, and the building of a multi-dimensional model of English listening by means of comparative experiments. In the experiments, it contrasted freshmen in class eight and seven from Liao Cheng Normal University. It aims at studying the teaching elements: (1) Is the strategy training instruction helpful to the improvement of LC? (2)Does the fostering of SALL (self –access Language Learning) have a positive effect on learners'LC ? (3) Is the multimedia-assisted language instruction (aesthetic instruction) a better choice to motivate and to keep learners'interest, and even to have the listening class more active? (4)Is the multi-dimensional model successful one for freshmen of English majors in universities? It used the qualitative and quantitative studies to identify the results of the experiment with listening tests , interviews and questionnaire surveys, and finally built the teaching model with complete introduction and identification from the listening test and questionnaire surveys. The major findings presented in the thesis are as follows: 1. All the factors concerned with LC, teachers, students, and teaching environment, have the same important influence on the freshmen in the universities of China. Teacher's guidance as a beacon is necessary; Students should not only depend on teachers as before. They should employ their sufficient spare time to complement their rare class-time, which is the role of SALL; and last is teaching environment , which is the bridge connected actively teachers with students, and also continuously motivate and keep students'interest. 2. The survey and the experiment have demonstrated that listening strategy instruction is the basic step in the whole process, involving the teaching of metacognitive, cognitive and social or affective strategies. The teaching of strategies can guide students to learn well, help students understand materials better and more completely, and improve learning efficiency. The instruction of strategies really improves students'LC and three strategies can be taught together in the multi-dimensional framework. But the experiment also indicates that all the strategies should be taught with the same emphasis, but in fact not. One reason is that in class, teachers often explain one strategy intensively while neglecting another one; the other reason is the limited class time. 3. The experiment shows us that SALL is indispensable in the LC development. For all the postgraduates, there are only two periods every week for them to have listening class, and the task of pedagogical schedule is very heavy. So the facilitation of SALL is necessary. Teachers give them proper strategies about how-to-learn, about planning their learning and about evaluation of the result. The practice of such a learning way can solve students'problems of time shortage, heavy tasks and privacy, and promoted the improvement of LC. But from the experiment we also could see that the effect of SALL was not very satisfying. The reason, the author thought, is that there is not enough self-monitoring. The monitoring means in this experiment are mainly from students themselves and the teacher: the inertia from the students and the loosing supervision from the teacher. 4. In the analysis of teaching environment, the high technological equipment plays an important role in the class design. The aesthetic teaching case is the most welcomed teaching way. Traditional listening class only depends on recorders—playing and correcting answers, and even there is multi-media system, teachers only operated the recorder function. In the whole traditional class only ears are busy, but in the study in the aesthetic class, the ears and hands are all involved in the listening. So students can keep on excitation in the two hours. Furthermore, the learning content is not stereotyped and boring, and they are often the attracting stories, which can motivate their interest, but from the experiment we also found that 21% of students had hesitating attitudes towards the aesthetic instruction. For freshmen, some were from poverty areas and they had difficulties in dealing with computers and English. 5. In the study of teaching methods, if only one factor of the teaching system is emphasized, of if all the factors are involved but fail to be connected with each other in a multi-dimensional way, no system in FLT could be established and the function of the whole system which is bigger than that of the addition of all factors could not be fully developed either. Therefore, the study on the teaching of listening must be based on the...