Teaching Listening Comprehension To English Majors

Listening is an important language skill. As we all know, human beings come into contact with language and learn it first through listening. Further, listening is not only a language skill which needs separate training, but it is also a necessary way to learn languages. Therefore, listening plays an essential role in English language teaching. The listening proficiency directly influences the improvement of the whole English level. In the native language environment, the frequently used language skill is just listening. Someone once made an illustration of the proportion of the use of the varied language skills by such a comparison: "We listen to a book within one day, talk of a book within a week, read a book within a month, and write a book within a year", which fully confirms the positive function listening exerts on language learning. With the development of the theories of second language acquisition, people pay more and more attention to the important function listening performs in language learning. More and more specialists and theorists have already recognized the necessity to actively teach listening comprehension in classroom. Only when the listening proficiency was adequately developed, can students become confident in the language learning. Listening is a necessary way to input language. Only when language input accumulates to a certain extent, can language output become possible. Therefore, listening is the skill that should be given the priority to be developedover other three language skills. However, in the current English language teaching practice, listening comprehension is always a relatively weak link. With the proportion of listening comprehension increasing in Band 4 and 6 exams of College English, the teaching of listening comprehension is drawing more and more attention. In spite of this, there is little improvement in the traditional method of teaching listening comprehension. In the traditional way of teaching listening, it seems that the teacher's function is simply playing the tape and checking the answers. Students are also already accustomed to this mode of teaching in spite of the fact that they benefit little from it. Students regard the traditional teaching of listening as a matter of course and never give it a second thought. This sort of situation left the teaching of listening a dispensable course. This situation makes great discount on the improvement of the learners' language proficiency as a whole, and also frustrates the learners' initiative in learning English. Considering the current situation of teaching listening, the author makes a tentative attempt to reform some links in listening teaching in order to effectively promote students' listening proficiency.Language is used for communication for which listening is a premise. Listening, as an important link hi language communication, has its own characteristics including relentlessness, dynamics, and being controlled by utterance. Based on the cognizance of the nature and characteristics of listening process, and relevant theories of listening comprehension, and the analysis of the current situation of listening teaching, this thesis proposes a task-based approach to teaching listening. This approach fully reflects the communicative function of language, makes tasks run through the process of listening teaching and takes task-completion as the focus of classroom listening instruction. It emphasizes the use of authentic material, tries to construct a near-authentic languageenvironment by the design and fulfillment of listening tasks and activities, and aims toitrain learners to be functional under authentic language environment.The thesis is composed of six chapters.Chapter one explains the nature of listening comprehension, analyses the current situation of listening teaching, and briefly states the significance and general organization of this thesis.Chapter Two first analyses the characteristics of listening process, and then makes apretty detailed review of the theories relevant...