An Empirical Study Of Applying English Films And TV Programs To English Listening Teaching

This is a study of the feasibility and effects of teaching listening with films and TV programs. The research is a part of the English Learning Program directed by Shen Yuru, which is sponsored by Academic Affairs Office of Leshan Teachers College.According to Krashen's Input Hypothesis, the teacher should not only enable students to come into contact with large quantity of meaningful, interesting or relevant foreign language input materials but also provide them with low-affective filter learning environment. According to the Motivation Theory, the learner's motivation plays an important role in their language acquisition and it is vital for a language teacher to come up with some ways to motivate students. The Context Theory emphasizes the importance of context in language teaching and learning. Beyond teaching linguistic forms, the teacher should cultivate students' ability to use language, especially the ability to use language accurately, appropriately and fluently in specific contexts. The Communicative Language Teaching attaches much importance to the cultivation of communicative competence in ELT.Then the author introduced a pilot study conducted by utilizing films or TV programs to teach listening from September 2005 till now. The statistics result from the experiment suggest that there is indeed some correlation between teaching listening with films or TV programs and a learner's listening comprehension in general in language achievement tests at certain stages. The scores of the students from the experimental group are improved after 2 years of teaching with the new methods. (Final Test Band 2 and College English Test Band 4)Analysis and discussions have been done based on a questionnaire of 18 items and an interview involving 10 open-ended questions. The results showed that both the teachers and the students had positive attitudes towards teaching listening with films or TV programs. Most of them view this method as an effective way in ELT because it provides more opportunities for contextual practice and lowers their anxiety; it can also help to motivate them, stimulate their active participation and increase their activities as well. Therefore this method can be used to cultivate students' communicative competence.Consequently, we can draw the conclusion that this method has some advantages over teaching listening with the pre-taped materials in New College English. It may play an important role in ELT, especially in listening teaching.Based on the statistic analyses and the survey, some activities and techniques are provided for the teacher on how to teach listening with films or TV programs. The roles that an English teacher plays in this method are illustrated at the end of the thesis.