A Communicative Approach To The Teaching Of Listening In New College English

Language is an instrument for human communication, and the ultimate aim of language teaching is to help students develop their communicative competence. Since listening plays an important role in communication, listening course should be viewed as an important course. It should be the important place for Chinese students to acquire authentic English and the place to develop listening and speaking ability.However, the course material based on lexical-grammatical syllabus and the traditional listening classroom seem to have failed to help learners become effective and successful listeners both in and out of the classroom. Many learners have associated listening courses with pain and boredom and often complain that they benefit little from listening lessons. That explains to some extent why many learners' listening ability stagnates and remains at elementary level although their other skills like reading, writing are advancing steadily.The adoption of new course material New College English for the non-English majors sheds a new light on the improvement of the teaching of listening and speaking. But how to use this material effectively and properly may remain a problem for some teachers. This paper aims to analyze what effective listening entails and assumes to suggest a more effective approach, that is, communicative approach ,to listening course to non-English majors with the aid of the new teaching material to enhance listening comprehension, and to cultivate the students' listening and speaking ability and at thesame time communicative competence.'This thesis is composed of seven chapters.Chapter One is an introduction which discusses how essential listening is as a language skill for communication and the present lower-teaching quality. It is pointed out that it is an important and urgent task for teachers to apply the new course material and develop non-English majors' communicative competence because of the needs and demand of students and modern society.Chapter Two discusses about the notion of listening comprehension and its aims. Current problems of listening teaching are also mentioned to emphasize the necessity to apply communicative approach in FL listening course.Chapter Three is concerned with the notion of communicative competence, in which the development of the notion of communicative competence is elaborated. An elaboration is made upon the notion of communicative competence used in language teaching, communication language teaching and its application in China.Chapter Four deals with the application of CA in New College English in the aspect of listening. A detailed analysis is made on content of NCE design, listening methodology, relationship between listening and speaking, group work, etc. And the conclusion is drawn that New College English is more suitable for College English.Chapter Five is concerned with practical teaching based on competence techniques which might be employed in listening, speaking, group work and role-play.Chapter Six offers sample activities to illustrate how to organize group discussion, listening activities, role-play in teaching English in order to apply communicative approach to this course.Chapter Seven is the conclusion. It clearly draws that it is possible and feasible to improve learners' communicative competence if teachers make good use of the new course material based on communicative approach.