A Study Of The Problems And Countermeasures In English Listening Teaching In Higher Vocational Colleges

This study is undertaken to make an investigation into listening class in Higher Vocational College (HVC). The purpose of the study is to find out: What factors mainly affect the listening comprehension of HVC students? What types of listening materials do students and teachers of HVC choose? What strategies do the students of HVC use at present? On the basis of the results of the investigation, the author puts forward some countermeasures against those problems existing in English Listening teaching and learning, and then constructs a listening teaching model— interactive listening model.The subjects involved in the study were 150 students and 20 English teachers from three colleges in Yongzhou City. The students were asked to complete two self-designed questionnaires. And the teachers were given another questionnaire to complete. All these questionnaires were designed with reference to the questionnaires of Su(2003), Wang(2002)and Yang(2004). They adopted O'Malley and Chamot's taxonomy of learning strategies in the framework of cognitive theory. Besides, data analysis was done with Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 12.0.The results of the study reveal that most of the subjects including students and teachers think listening comprehension is the weaker or weakest one among the four skills. While concerning the factors affecting students' listening comprehension, the teachers and students hold a bit different attitude. The biggest divergence is that 90 percent of teachers regard listening strategy as the most important factor affecting listening comprehension while only 12 percent of students consider that the listening strategy affects their listening comprehension. However, to the researcher's surprise, both groups of subjects think (68%, 85% and 44 %, 80 %) that vocabulary and pronunciation are the important factors affecting listening comprehension. Similarly, they both regard the background knowledge as another important factor students lack while listening. Of the three major categories of listening strategies (meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies and social-affectivestrategies), the means of the use of cognitive strategies are the highest while those of the use of meta-cognitive strategies are the lowest. And in the category of cognitive strategies, the means of the bottom-up strategy use (i.e. 3.055, 3.277, 3.611, 3.722) are generally higher than those of top-down strategies (i.e. 2.611, 2.777, 3.444, 2.166, 2.444). This shows that the most frequently used listening strategies by the students in HVC are bottom-up strategies. That is, most students employ the bottom-up strategies, while only a few of students use top-down strategies. The possible explanation is that they have got into the habit of listening to the materials word by word, then sentence by sentence, and usually forget some information though they hear clearly when they listen to another part of the paragraph. That's the result of the traditional English teaching methods in China: phonetic-- words — sentences -* paragraphs.The results of the study imply that there exist many problems affecting listening comprehension of HVC students, including listening materials, linguistic problems, ignorance of introducing background knowledge, inadequate creation of practice opportunities, lack of systematic listening strategy training.Based on the major findings, suggestions are made to listeners and teachers. English teachers should choose not only authentic materials, materials relevant to the students' majors but also interesting, contemporary and moderate materials. The researcher tells the students how to deal with linguistic problems while listening, such as new words, assimilation, liaison, intonation, stress, or difficult sentence structures. Corresponding to those problems in listening class, the researcher putsforward a listening class model------an interactive model, in which someinteractive skills, such as introducing and activating background knowledge, developing the skills of using the function of lexical phrases are introduced;And then the improvement of listening comprehension by means of reading, writing, and speaking is encouraged.