A Study On Extracurricular Audio-visual Practice Of English Majors

For a long time, listening comprehension has been a disturbing problem to English majors. In colleges, listening hours in class is not sufficient for the students to improve their listening comprehension so extracurricular audio-visual practice is a necessity in the students'listening comprehension improvement. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, the author did a questionnaire, aiming to find the existing conditions among 63 English majors. Interviews were done to get an idea of individual difference in audio-visual practice. The research analyzed the correlation among three variables: time spent on extracurricular audio-visual practice, listening comprehension and their overall English proficiency. The author tried to find an effective way to improve the students'listening comprehension, hoping to make the learners pay more attention to listening.The questionnaire concerned about 63 English majors enrolled in Qingdao University of Science and Technology. Time spent on extracurricular audio-visual practice, listening materials selection, listening strategies, together with the investigators'purposes in extracurricular audio-visual practice and the effects of the activity were taken into consideration. The thesis analyzes the correlation between extracurricular audio-visual practice and listening comprehension. Cohort model and Logogen model were employed to explain the significance of effective extracurricular audio-visual practice in listening comprehension achievement. The research showed that listening without any strategies or purposes failed to bring remarkable improvement to the learners.The results showed that 63 students in the investigation failed to spend much time in extracurricular audio-visual practice and they had the exam-oriented tendency in choosing listening materials. Their extracurricular audio-visual practice was un-systematic, and they lacked diversification of accompanied training in extra-curricular audio-visual practice, in stead of which they were confined to native accent imitation, entertainment, etc. No significant correlation was found among three variables: the quantity of extracurricular audio-visual practice, the learners'listening comprehension and their English proficiency. The study on extracurricular audio-visual practice could help the students choose suitable audio-visual materials, improve their accompanied training practice and improve their extracurricular audio-visual practice as well.