Designing Effective Listening Materials On The Basis Of Information Processing Theories

Appropriate teaching materials are of great importance to both language teaching andlearning. How to design effective material has long been a topic that arouses attention.This paper deals with the designing of language teaching materials from one specificaspect---listening. Listening involves a natural process of information processing inthe brain. The theories that have been generated from the research ofpsycholinguistics and foreign language teaching are undoubtedly of an activedirection to the designing of listening materials.The paper sets out to look at the main theoretical issues describing the informationprocessing theories that are related to listening, and lays stress on the principles fordesigning effective listening materials on the basis of the previously introducedtheories, and then puts these principles into practice: it gives a detailed analysis of aset of widely used listening material, pointing out its strengths and weaknessesaccording to the principles discussed in the foregoing chapters.