The Role Of Teaching Listening In Chinese EFL Classroom

The present paper studies the role of teaching listening to Chinese EFL college students as part of training for a College English course which focuses on reading skills. One aim of the study is to investigate whether training in listening skills has any effects on the reading skills of Chinese EFL college students. Another aim is to explore students' listening experiences and their difficulties in doing listening tasks. The third aim is to stud)' how to teach listening in EFL classroom. On the basis of relevant research results in first- and second-language acquisition, the study claims that listening and reading are parallel processes and so the underlying text processing skills of listening comprehension are transferable to reading comprehension. A quantitative and qualitative study takes the form of an experiment in which two parallel classes of 61 second-year Chinese EFL students are assigned into a control group and an experimental group. The control group has 2X100-minute sessions a week of College English Intensive Reading Book II. in which the students are provided with grammar exercises, writing, and reading tasks, and the teacher regularly assesses their worksheets and discusses emerging problems in the class. The experimental group has 1x100 -minute session a week of College English Intensive Reading Book II and the same length of listening classes in the language lab doing the listening comprehension tasks. The experimental group is neither given extra grammar exercises nor extra reading or writing tasks. A pre-test- a post-test and an achievement test are administered in both groups to compare the improvement of their listening and reading comprehension achievements. The 31 students in the experimental group are asked to give feedback on the listening course by filling in a questionnaire (see Appendix 1).The findings of this study can be summarized as follows:1) Listening and reading are parallel processes and the underlying text-processing skills of listening comprehension are transferable to reading comprehension.2) The experimental group outperforms the control group in listening and reading comprehension achievements.3) Listening training has more impact on students with average listening ability than students above or below average.Pedagogic implications of the findings are listed as follows:1) Listening course should be added to the curriculum design for Chinese EFL college students.2) The teaching of skills should be direct!) integrated into classroom instructional plans so that teachers can teach both the language contents and listening skills, and provide students with the opportunities for the learning of both the language and language processing skills at the same time. Besides teaching bottom-up skills, teachers should encourage students to exploit their background knowledge and provide practice in how to anticipate, infer, draw conclusions and recognize information structures.3) Teachers should teach for transfer of listening text-processing skills to reading skills in EFL classroom.4) In the course of skill training, teachers should take into account the varied needs of the students with different listening abilities. The training should be aimed at providing help to the great majority while not be boring for the more advanced students and not discouraging those who have limited proficiency either.