Effects Of Mastery Learning Approach On Adult Students' Listening Comprehension

Chinese adult college students are a special group of students,who are different from the ordinary university students.They are required to be practical workers instead of academic researchers.In the aspect of English study,the Ministry of Education emphasized that the English teachers should teach the essential English knowledge and the basic skills to the adult college students;in the meantime,the teachers should foster their ability of practically using English to communicate.That is to say,the adult college English should give prominence to the students' listening and speaking of the target. language.But actually the adult college students are usually of low language proficiency and they do not have positive attitude toward English listening.This makes the English teachers feel anxious and they are eager to change this situation.But the traditional teaching methods cannot help.Since 1970s,many of the researches have studied on Mastery Learning on the effectiveness of the approach on various aspects of second language acquisition study. But the researches are seldom on whether this is an effective approach to improve the Chinese adult college students' English listening.In this case,the author would like to do this research to find out the effectiveness of using Mastery Learning Approach to improve the adult college students' English listening and whether this approach can help the students form more positive attitude toward English listening than the traditional teaching approach in which students' scores are mainly decided by the final exam,With the analysis of the post-questionnaires on 50 adult learners in two classes(experiment class and control class),it shows that students have a positive attitude toward Mastery Learning Approach and English learning.Analysis of two tests' scores indicates an improved achievement.The result of the research shows that Mastery Learning Approach can help the students form more positive attitude toward English listening than the traditional teaching approach.In the aspect of the students' listening achievement,the result shows that the students in the Mastery Learning lessons can obtain higher scores than their counterparts in the traditional lessons.All of the students in the Mastery Learning class can reach the mastery level 70 score while only 44%of the students in the traditional lessons.This does not show that students in the Mastery Learning class were smarter,but they were given more opportunities to learn.The structure of the thesis is organized as follows:Chapter One introduces the background of the research and the structure of the research.Chapter Two presents the literature review,which reviews Behaviorism and the related ideas of "Mastery Learning", together with the essential elements of it.Chapter Three describes the research methodology.Chapter Four shows the data of the experiment and makes a discussion. Chapter Five draws a conclusion to the whole thesis and gives the implications and limitations of the research.