An Empirical Research On Junior High School English Listening Teaching Based On Register Theory

Under the exam-oriented education,teachers attached importance to reading,vocabulary and grammar in English teaching,while listening was often neglected.Teachers adopt a single “bottom-up” traditional listening teaching mode when choosing teaching methods,which greatly stifled the improvement of students’ listening comprehension ability and development of their listening style.Register theory is composed of three elements: field,tenor and mode.Students can predict discourse structure.The three elements restrict separately conceptual,interpersonal and textual functions.Learners predict the meaning and organization of discourse according to context.Prediction is bidirectional.Listening materials are divided into open and closed categories.The predictability of register is directly related to the similarity of content.Generally speaking,the stronger the closeness of register is,the stronger the predictability will be.The weaker the closeness of register is,the weaker the predictability will be.The relevant studies about listening teaching based on register theory at home and abroad are tiny.The aim of this current study is to evaluate the effects of listening teaching based on register theory on junior high school students’ listening comprehension,compared with the traditional bottom-up listening teaching.Three research questions were solved by the end of the thesis: First,what is the current situation of English listening teaching? Second,what aspects need improvement in junior high school English listening teaching based on register theory? Third,what is the outcome of listening teaching based on register theory?In the experiment,72 Grade 8 students in two classes of junior middle school in Changzhou were selected as research subjects,prospectively.It lasted one semester.Results of the pre-questionnaire proved there was no significant difference between students in two classes.After adopting different teaching methods,the author collected data of post-test between EC and CC,then crosswise and longitudinal contrastive analysis between the data was made by SPSS 22.00.The experimental results show that: 1.In listening teaching,students’ motivation and initiative of listening English passages or conversations were ignored.There is no sufficient emphasis paid on activating students’ general prior knowledge;2.In the experiment,the most important function of register theory,prediction,was used in junior high school English listening class.In the aspects of improvement,prediction is not limited to the use of pre-listening activities,but also used to link the original knowledge-related materials and the talkers’ emotional attitude after listening;3.After one semester,the post-test results of each class were compared with those of the pretest.The pretest was 15.23 and the post-test was 18.12 in Class 1,while the pretest was 15.23 and the post-test was 16.79 in Class 2.The listening ability of the two classes was significantly improved compared with that of the beginning of the semester.Traditional listening teaching and listening teaching based on register theory are both effective.Moreover,students’ listening comprehension in the experimental class was significantly higher than that of the control class,which was different from the post-test results.The score of EC was 18.12 and the score of CC was 16.79(p = 0.025).It was clear that listening teaching based on register theory is more effective than traditional listening teaching.The data from the post-experiment questionnaires in the experimental class showed that the teaching of English listening under register theory is accepted by students.This study provides some pedagogical implications for the implementation of register theory-based English listening teaching in junior middle schools in the future.More importantly,students in EC learned to make appropriate pre-listening prediction to improve listening comprehension.