A Tentative Experiment On Listening Teaching Of College English Through Movies

With the development of modernization of education, teaching equipments and devices are changing now. The process of education modernization has greatly advanced the pace of the reformation of English teaching. It is noteworthy that the listening teaching, for quite a period of time, has been conducted in a sole and boring teaching mode: explaining new words, listening to the tapes, doing the exercises and checking the answers. It is widely acknowledged that this approach hasn't led to desirable achievement results. Indeed, it does affect the improvement of learners' listening abilities somehow. In this case, many language teachers try to use different methods to improve students' listening ability, of which English movie is regarded as an effective way of achieving that goal.This paper studies the feasibility and effectiveness of teaching listening for three-year-college students whose major is not English with videos devices, i.e. movies. In order to justify the application of this method from theoretical foundation, the author gives a brief introduction to some related theories: Constructivism theory, the Input Hypothesis of Krashen and Affective Hypothesis, Schema theory and Motivation theory. The theories surveyed provide sufficient theoretic basis for this new method of listening lecture giving. Further, through the close study of related researches both home and abroad, the author presents strong theoretical support to this paper. Then, this paper summarizes the characteristics of traditional listening method and the advantages of movies watching as the main way of listening input in the class.Based on the above mentioned theories and advantages of movies, the author makes a preliminary investigation. The results indicate that students are interested in this method of learning. Thus, the author introduces a pilot study conducted by utilizing movies to teach listening class from March 2007 till June 2007. In this experiment, the students are divided into two parts from an optional course entitled as "Appreciating English Movies". We have 35 students in the experimental group and 35 in the control group.The differences between the two classes lie in that the experimental group has a class in which movies have been employed as the main vehicle of teaching, while the control group has a class in which the traditional method (tape playing-listening-answer checking) have been used. A pretest and a posttest are conducted for both groups at the beginning and the end of the semester respectively. The data of these tests were processed by the software SPSS13.0. The statistical results from the experiment seem to suggest that it is a failure. After analyzing the results from the experimental study, the author has done a deep thought, which leads to the finding of some notable problems in the experiment. After carefully analyzing those problems found there, we put forwards some proposals on how to improve and solve those problems. Our study will benefit those who will employ movie watching as the main way of teaching listening classes in the future.However, from the paired T-test, the author has tentatively drawn the conclusion that this method will be more effective if properly used. It may also play an important role in listening teaching.