The Interactive Approach To Listening Comprehension Teaching--An Experimental Report

This thesis is a tentative endeavor to synthesize the merits and to make up for the deficiencies of the achievements in listening comprehension teaching thus far made in China and the English-speaking countries, with a focus on listening comprehension teaching approaches to freshmen of English majors of a third class university. To address that topic, an experimental approach is employed as general framework for the research work.To start with, the thesis explains the necessity and the purpose of the research, and then puts in three research questions: (1) To freshmen of English majors of a third class university, are there limitations of mainly top-down approach? If there are, what are they? (2) Which one is more effective to these students, the interactive approach or the top-down approach? (3) In the interactive approach, should the top-down and the bottom-up processing modes be paid equal attention to or one outweighs another to freshmen of English majors of a third class university?Then a literature review on listening comprehension process was done. Listening comprehension, making sense of what we hear, is more than hearing. It is a complex and constructive process which involves process-oriented thinking skills and in which the learner is an active participant. In order to comprehend, listeners need to reconstruct the original intention of the speaker by making use of both bottom-up and top-down processing modes, and by drawing on what they already know to make use of new knowledge. The top-down processing refers to utilizing schemata to derive meaning from and interpret the message, while the bottom-up processing mode refers to deriving the meaning of the message based on the incoming language data, from sounds, to words, to grammatical relationships, to meaning. Listening comprehension involves bottom-upprocessing and top-down processing, which process at the same time and interact each other. This complex process is often described as interactive processing mode of language understanding.After a documentation of the listening comprehension process, the thesis explains how the research was carried out. It defines the variables in the experiment and depicts the subjects, the teaching materials, allocation of time, method and procedure. There are two independent variables and one dependent variable in the research. The two independent variables are proficiency levels of learners and approaches to listening comprehension teaching, while the dependent one is ESL listening comprehension. Our subjects were 148 freshmen who entered Wuhan University of Science & Engineering (WUSE), a third class university, in the fall semester of 2004. Listen To This: 1 is the designated textbook for listening comprehension course. In addition, one more teaching material New Concept English (Book 3, New Edition) was adopted. Based on their scores of English in the National Entrance Examination, students of the same level were assigned to four classes in which the classes 041 and 042 are at the same level and better than the classes 043 and 044 of the same level. The classes 041 and 043 were chosen as the experimental class 1 and 2, while the other two classes were control class 1 and 2. Different approaches adopted to listening comprehension teaching differentiated the two kinds of classes. For the control classes, we used the top-down approach, and for the experimental classes, the interactive approach was employed. Before and after the experiment, one set of listening comprehension exercises from College English Test 4 Examination Question Bank was chosen respectively as tests for freshmen. The types of the two tests were identical. In order to avoid students to guess answers, multiple choices were changed into open-ended questions to which the answers were unambiguous. After the experiment, the thesis analyzed the tests with SPSS and then comes to a conclusion according to the results. To freshmen of English majors of a third class university, linguistic proficiency is the foundation of their listening comprehension,and...