The Application Of English Songs In English Listening Class In Higher Vocational College

Modern language teaching, which involves four related language skills, is expected not only to provide enough language knowledge, but also train the student's ability to communicate by practice in reading, writing, listening and speaking. Listening is not only the main way to get language information and language feelings, but also is one of the important ways to improve one's other skills.An investigation of the listening class in Hubei Polytechnic Institute, which is a Higher Vocational College(HVC), shows that most HVC students are still very poor in listening comprehension even after they have had at least six or seven years of learning English throughout their middle school.One of the most important reasons is that most students often feel nervous in the listening class, and they are lacking in self-confidence in English learning. Therefore, there's no doubt that we should enhance listening practice during our English teaching, especially for students in HVC.It's said that songs is an article form consisting of both poems and music. Songs will help students to learn foreign languages, and appreciate the melody and the rhythm of the foreign language, for songs embody cultural differences as well as the essential factors of a language, such as pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary and rhythm.According to an investigation carried out among HVC students, the present author finds out that most students like songs and music, so she puts forward the hypothesis that the application of English songs in English Listening Class will enhance the effect of the study in English listening in HVC. The present study discusses the application of English songs in listening class for HVC students by investigating the effect of English songs, the conclusions of other professors or teachers, and analyses of the listening training effects with English songs.This thesis is composed of five chapters. In Chapter One, introduction, background research, research questions and research purpose were being showed. In Chapter Two, I review some literatures on the research of application of English song into listening teaching. Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation of my research, with Krashen's Input Hypothesis and The Affective Filter Hypothesis being the focus, in addition, which also with analyses according to psychology. In Chapter Four, a one-term teaching experiment was conducted in order to confirm the validity of the hypothesis in practice. The Experimental Class and the Control Class are respectively taught by using different teaching methods. The teaching result demonstrates that the scores of the Experimental Class are higher than that of the Control Class in the post-experiment. To further make sure the significance of the teaching experiment, the students' scores were inputted into computer, and SPSS was used to analyze them. The result indicates that the differences of the two classes are significant statistically. So in Chapter Five we can draw the conclusion that the practicing English listening through English songs can improve students' listening comprehension, can inspire students' interests to learn English well, can stimulate students' learning initiative, and invigorate the class atmosphere.