On Cultivating Listening Competence At The Initial Stage Of CET

Language is an instrument of communication, and the ultimate aim of language teaching is to help learners develop their communicative competence. Listening comprehension (LC) is an essential language skill, as well as a prerequisite for oral proficiency. As the development of economic globalization, English is becoming more and more important as a means of communication. Especially with China's entry to WTO and winning for hosting the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, more and more people begin to realize the importance of the mastery of English. LC plays an important role in communication, so listening course should be viewed as an important course. However, the course materials based on lexical-grammatical syllabus and the traditional listening classroom seems to have failed to help learners become effective and successful listeners. Many learners have associated listening courses with pain and boredom and often complain that they benefit little from listening classes. Many students, especially those at college often complain that they cannot talk with foreigners naturally although they have learned enough words, phrases, and sentences. Even worse, when they graduate from colleges or universities, they always can't satisfy their managers in dealing with foreign affairs as employees, though they hold CET4/6 certificates.Nowadays, though English listening has been taught in colleges and universities, it was still not attended to a sufficient degree by teachers and students. Ironically, for many teachers, teaching listening is the easiest of all English lectures. Most teachers follow the structure of the textbook closely and conduct the lessons in a mechanical manner like this: play tape—- check up—- play the next part—- check up again…. Little time is spared for listening– strategy training. Once correct answers are given to students, the lesson is "finished". During the whole listening class, the teacher is the controller of tape recorder, and the students are the tape recorders. Little by little, students lose their interests in listening course. English listening teaching is especially important at the initial stage of college English teaching (CET). That is because the initial stage is a transitional period from senior middle school to college, which will decide the students' success or failure in English learning at university or college.This study aims to answer the following questions:(1) Can you adapt to the college English learning? Why?(2) What's the most difficult factor in college English learning in the first year?(3) What do you want to improve in the college English class? Why?(4) How were your English listening classes conducted before?The author conducted questionnaires among roughly 120 students from Shandong Normal University, Grade 1, the second semester, non-English major. From the questionnaires, the answers to the target questions are found:(1) Most freshmen cannot adapt to the college English learning immediately because of the quite different teaching methods. That is the very reason why it is important to cultivate listening competence at the initial stage of CELT.(2) The most difficult aspect in their college English learning in the first year is listening and speaking mainly because of their lacking of practicing in senior middle school (see Table 6).(3) Listening and speaking are just what college students want to improve in the college English lesson (see Table 9), because most college students wish to master English as a communicative means.(4) Most students had their listening class passively before, and achieved little progress.The author tries to bring forward some suggestions on the basis of 3B teaching Approach and hopes that this study can offer some guidelines for the future study on the CELT.