Research On Interactive Approach To Teaching Of English Listening In Vocational Colleges

Listening is not a passive activity. It is a complex, active process in which the listener is supposed to discriminate between sounds, understand words and grammatical structures, interpret intonation, retain what was gathered in all of the above, and interpret it according to the larger socio-cultural context of the utterance. In traditional listening classrooms, the teacher and prescribed listening materials are the focus of the class where the teacher organizes the class lacking of proper principles. Listening training is rather goal-oriented. The students give feedback in the form of "right answer" in such exercises as multiple choices, true or false judgment and dictation. As a result, the students have naturally become record players or answer givers. The teaching of listening has been substituted by checking. In this kind of teaching and learning classroom, as the students are facing a lot of exercises and tests, they lose interest in the procedure and are concerned with the scores they will get and afraid of failure. Here, listening is undoubtedly a frightening burden for students, which leads to a mental block in students' minds and prevents them from fully profiting from the language they are being exposed to. Even when they intend to be active, they are forced to be passive and unmotivated. The goal of our listening class is still bound to how to do listening exercises instead of how to interact and communicate in real life. The internalization of language competence is still far away from the students under this kind of teaching pattern. Under the stern present condition of the teaching of listening, the thesis puts forward an interactive approach. Interaction refers to the dynamic mutual functioning procedure in which the interactive participants send, receive, and interpret messages in a live communicational situation. The interactive approach can reduce the listener's anxiety and offer them a dynamic, relatively free atmosphere and environment to interact with other participants in listening interaction. When a student comes to a listening class, he or she encounters at least 3 entities other than himself—the teacher, the authentic listening materials and other classmates—which, if under appropriate guidance by the teacher, allow 4 types of interaction to take place, namely, teacher-listening material interaction, teacher-student (s) interaction, student (s) -listening material interaction and student (s) -student (s) interaction. This thesis tries to find an answer theoretically and empirically to thefollowing questions: "Does the interactive approach have any effect on the teaching of listening comprehension? If yes, to what an extent?" The objects of the research experiment include four general classes of second-year non-English majors of the year 2004 of Wuhan Vocational College of Communications. The data in quantitative research has showed that the experiment groups had better scores than control groups. The findings indicate that the interactive approach to listening facilitates teaching and learning.