A Study On The Integration Of Listening Classroom Instruction And Web-assisted Autonomous Learning

For many years,College English education has always been teacher-centered which regards the students as passive learners.In such learning environment,the students are asked to do many drills in classes but what they learn are only isolated,de-contextualized skills and are unable to apply them in real-world situations.The learner-centered online learning,with principles of learner autonomy,collaborative learning,inquiry and community,injects vitality to the reforms of College English teaching.In China,the acquisition of English listening competency has always been a big challenge for students in universities.So for its typical features listening course is chosen as the study case in the paper in order to validate the feasibility and effects of the reform in the College English course by integrating computer and web into the listening class.This study is a part of the Integrated Practice of Conventional Classroom Instruction Mode and Web-Assisted Language Learning Mode,conducted in Binzhou Medical University and sponsored by the Educational Department of Shandong Province.In order to justify the application of a hybrid of conventional and web-assisted autonomous learning from theoretical point of view,the author first gives a brief introduction to some previous researches and related theories:constructivist instructional and learning theories,the concept of autonomous learning and the acquisition of listening comprehension.They provide sufficient theoretic basis for this experimental study.The correlations between constructivism and WALL,WALL and autonomous listening learning are also presented in the thesis.Then the author introduces an experimental study on the integrated practice of web-assisted autonomous learning and conventional listening class from September 2006 to October 2007.The subjects(n=317)of this study are non-English majors enrolled in Binzhou Medical University in 2006,who were studying English during the time of the survey.The subjects were divided into the experimental group(E.G.)and the control group (C.G.).When we chose E.G.and C.G.,care had been taken that the class means(121.493, 122.779)and standard deviations(4.811,5.437)of the subjects' English performance in National Entrance Examination in both groups were pretty close.E.G.followed the lesson plans designed by the teacher and fulfilled their listening tasks under the integrated mode of conventional listening classroom instruction and web-assisted autonomous learning while C.G.followed the conventional mode of listening instruction.Both groups implemented the experiment in the same language lab and used the same textbook-New Horizon College English.The information that forms the core of this study was obtained by means of three instruments:listening tests,questionnaires and interviews.The tests used genuine College English Listening Test Band4(CET-4).The listening part in the proficiency tests consisted of three parts:short conversations,short passages and a compound dictation.The questionnaire—the Listening Strategy Inventory,was designed based on Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning.The subjects' listening scores and their responses to the questionnaires were put into the computer and analyzed by means of the SAS.In order to collect in-depth information on students' and teachers' role changes,semi-structured interview was conducted with 50 students from E.G.and 50 students from C.G.in October, 2007.The study was guided by the following four questions:1)Can the implementation of the new learning mode result in significant improvement of students' listening proficiency?2)What strategies do the students use in the integrated mode? Is there correlation between the strategies and the listening proficiency?3)What roles do students and teachers play in the new learning mode? Do the roles they play differ from those in the conventional classroom teaching?4)What improvement can we make to perfect our mode so as to provide a better learning environment for students in listening practice and at the same time promote their learner autonomy?After the one-year long experiment,the study finds:As the experiment proceeds, students in E.G.gradually perform better than those in the C.G.and there has been a significant improvement of students' listening proficiency by the end of the experiment while no such outcome has been found in C.G..There are associations between learning strategies and listening outcomes in the new mode and Oxford's six categories of learning strategies affect successful and unsuccessful language learners differently.In the experimental process,students in E.G.began to make more decisions on their own learning and take more responsibility,which enabled them to move from a passive language learner to an active one.In this way,their learner autonomy has been promoted as well.At the initial stage,the teacher still had quite a lot of control over the teaching process,but gradually they relinquished some control and gave it to the learners.Meanwhile,they began to assume a new role as materials developer.At the end,the thesis tries to point out some limitations and also provide possible implications of this research to teaching and further research.The new mode has some advantages over the conventional one in College English teaching and learning.It is feasible if the technological barriers are removed and conditions permit.Web- assisted autonomous learning may play an important role in the future College English teaching and even in the English Language Teaching field.