An Attempt Of The Computer-based Process Approach In The English Teaching Of Listening And Speaking

Listening and speaking are important language skills. They play a vital role in the language acquisition process, and their successful development is of prime concern to language teachers. Last year, in order to develop students' listening and speaking ability, Wuhan University introduced New Era Interactive English, a newly developed teaching software, to the listening and speaking course of all 2004-year students, which was on a much grander scale than any other university. Being the first to take such great actions, it is natural to arouse much attention. So the paper is designed to make a research on the effectiveness of the multimedia program, in the hope that it will breathe new vigor into the listening and speaking course.The paper discussed present situations of college English listening and speaking teaching, making a conclusion that much importance was attached to the product, .. which used to puzzle the writing teaching. One glance at current journals in the teaching of writing reveals quite an array of materials on the process approach. Going deep into its theoretical foundation, the paper adopted the interactionist theory (Li Sen 2000: 19). Realizing that listening and speaking also make learners involve a certain interactive process, it is assumed that it would be feasible to borrow the process approach from writing. Then a new model was presented with proceduralized teaching and individualized learning combined, by penetrating into the essence of Communicative Language Teaching. The integration of computer, the most technological teaching method, stretches the new model, the computer-based process approach coming into being. And it is believed that New Era Interactive English has conformed to the model.The study set out to examine the following three research hypotheses: 1) The improvement of listening ability would be greater while using computer-based multimedia than audio cassette; 2) The greater improvement would be attributable to learners' favorable attitudes towards computer-based multimedia; 3) Learners would be more willing to speak in a computer-based process approach than in a traditionalway. Considering all 2004-year students have got access to the program, there is much difficulty in making a good match between the experimental group and the controlled group. So the paper made a diachronic research. The subjects were chosen from 2004-year, 2003-year and 2002-year students in School of remote sensing information engineering and School of geodesy and geomatics, with 124 for each grade. Their selection was random. Then it compared listening improvement rates from their placement test to their first-term final examination. The data analysis showed much greater improvement while using multimedia than in a traditional way. Due to different examinations they have taken, a reliability analysis was made, consequently getting a satisfactory result. In order to know about their attitudes to their English study, the questionnaires were designed for them respectively, due to their different learning environment. The questionnaires indicated the greater listening improvement rates might be attributed to 2004-year students' strongly favorable attitudes, that they believed they could practice listening effectively from multimedia and that it delivered a high quality individualized learning experience. Besides, concerning the influence of the listening and speaking course on promoting learners to speak, they showed more favorable attitudes to using the multimedia program. The self-assessment of themselves as speaker was more satisfactory along the three dimensions of confidence, relaxation and excellence than that of 2003-year and 2002-year students.At last, implications of these results were put forward. Among these are the need of a learning tool for language learners, the introduction of visual authentic texts to the learning situation and the application of individualized learning to language classes.