Application Of Output To Cultivation Of Communicaive Competence In College English Listening Teaching

With the development of social economy and international exchange, the cultivation of communicative competence in foreign language teaching has drawn more and more attention. Communicative approach in language teaching makes us consider language not only in terms of its structures, but also in terms of the communicative functions that language performs. The ultimate aim of foreign language teaching is to develop learners' communicative competence through language, rather than make them master perfectly individual structures. Therefore, educators should provide learners with ample opportunities to use the language for communication.In listening class, teachers pay much attention to language input but they usually neglect language output. Many students spend much time and work hard to practice listening. However, they have much trouble in understanding and responding in daily communication, even though they can get high marks in exams. For example, when they listen to flight schedules, announcements and a multitude of other sources or when they speak to native or advanced speakers in real-life situations, they find they are in such awkward situations. The reason is that they may be proficient in target language knowledge, but not in communicative competence. Language input and language output make a complete process of communication. In order to develop students' communicative competence in listening teaching, language output can't be neglected.Confronted with such situations, teachers should rethink their teaching aims and teaching methods. It is necessary to take communicative competence into consideration in listening teaching. In view of the current needs of foreign language learning and the essence of the language teaching, more language production should be done by learners in listening class. In other words, language output should be incorporated in listening teaching.The present study consists of a teaching experiment and a questionnaire survey. The experiment was designed to confirm if language output in listening class could enhance students' communicative competence and how to meet this requirement. In addition, a questionnaire survey was conducted in experimental class to collect information about the students' attitudes to individual output activities, such as retelling, dubbing, and discussing, etc.The subjects in this experiment were 70 sophomores of non-English majors from Shandong College of Electronic Technology in Jinan, and all of them had certain listening and speaking abilities. The students were from two natural classes, majoring in computer and Internet technology, having the same courses from college. One was experimental class and the other was control class.They used the same textbook, New Horizon College English. The teaching materials, the total teaching periods, weekly periods and teachers in these two classes were kept the same. However, different teaching plans were prepared. The traditional listening teaching method was applied in the control class, that was to say, students were mainly told to listen to the tapes and do exercises in textbook as usual. The students in the experimental class were arranged to conduct output in oral and written forms. In order to ensure the validity of this experiment, the students were not informed that they were involved in an experiment. The experiment lasted from September 2007 to January 2008, twenty weeks in all.All the subjects were exposed to materials that were in real communicative situations. Considering their needs and real proficiency of English, all the students were given pronunciation training at the word level and sentence level. The pronunciation training was combined with the lessons in a flexible way.Pre-test and post-test papers were given to a third-year class to ascertain that they could be used as parallel tests. Pre-test and post-test were given before and after the experiment respectively. The data about the tests were analyzed by SPSS (the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). The results of post-test showed that after twenty weeks' experiment, the students in experimental class improved their communicative competence greatly. They did much better than students in control class in the post-test. Though the control class also made progress, there was an obvious difference between the two classes in mean scores. We can conclude that output activities in college English listening class are beneficial to cultivate of communicative competence.From the analysis of the questionnaire, the author found those output activities evoked the interest of students to practice listening and their desire to communicate in English. Most of the students in experimental class held a positive attitude to those output activities, though the degrees of popularity of those output activities were a little different.The study provided some basic data for further scientific analysis. The experiment can give teachers a general idea to what should be paid attention to in the process of language production in English listening classes. It can also provide some clues for future research in this field.Due to the limited period and scale, the experiment needs further considerations. Based on the research, the author provides some suggestions on listening teaching and testing and hopes that her study can be beneficial to future study in this field.