Positive Impact Of Visual Factors On English Listening Teaching In Higher Vocational Colleges

The English course of higher technical and vocational education should not only strengthen the training of language foundation and basic language skills, but also attach great importance to students'competence of applying language to communication. However, teaching of listening skill in most of the higher vocational colleges lacks practicability at present. This is because the teaching content is overwhelmingly filled with knowledge input while skill training and development is completely neglected. The teaching method can be described as"teacher—blackboard—course book—tape-recorder". As a result, the listening classes have become boring because it is tape recorder centered which is often accompanied by explanations and doing of exercises. Then the students have almost lost their interests to English listening.Psychologists have made experiment to test the channels people use to obtain information. The finding shows that 83.5% of information is obtained through visual sensation. People catch most information from with the eyes. Therefore it is necessary to adopt visual factors in the training of students'listening. Aural and visual factors should coordinate to serve the listening teaching. (Hu Long, 2002) In this sense, the present research aiming at exploring the effectiveness of visual factors on China's higher vocational college students'listening enhancement and at providing evidence for further integration of the visual factors into college English teaching was conducted.On the basis of literature review on listening teaching and visual factors, quantitative research in the study to probe the effectiveness of visual factors in listening teaching in China's higher vocational college was mainly employed. Three vocational colleges in Zibo were chosen in the experiment. Four non-English classes of students enrolled in 2007 in each college were chosen at random to take the pretest. According to the data analysis of their pretest, two classes in each college whose listening proficiency were most parallel were named as the project of the research with the experimental group and the control group. Through 17 weeks'teaching experiment, the posttest was taken by all of the classes. Meanwhile, in order to find out students'feedback to visual factors in listening teaching, the subjects were required to finish a questionnaire. All the data were processed with the SPSS software.The results showed that, visual-factor-based instruction does have a significantly beneficial effect on the improvement of China's vocational college student's listening proficiency. The research data also indicated that situated learning, comprehensible input, and emotional learning were the unique factors offered by the visual factors which facilitate students'listening proficiency development. Meanwhile, the data revealed that students hold positive attitudes towards visual-factor-based instruction, and they regarded use of the visual factors for English learning, especially for improving their listening, as an effective and motivating means.These findings have led the study to some implications and suggestions for English listening training. Pedagogical strategies in the application of the visual factors were summarized. In class, choosing proper visual factors related to the course content can be effective. Elements related to the culture of the aiming foreign language should be adopted to help apprehend the key point. Multi-media language lab can offer the students the comprehensive aural and visual environment, in which visual factors can be applied freely and changed over willfully and self study environment can be easily established. Online learning application is another important strategy. Using Internet in class can offer an environment of acquiring information to assist teaching and offer to the students at any time. In order to get the most use out of the visual factors, the teacher should construct them reasonably in class. Class time needs to be arranged orderly. Meanwhile, learning techniques training and learning strategies teaching should be focused on to let the students know how to learn.The thesis had only discussed the positive impact of visual factors because of the limitation of the research conditions and the length of the article. Not both sides of the coin were analyzed well, which should be a limitation. If the negative effect of visual factors were also discussed and taken into the consideration of the experiment, proposing the strategy at the same time, it would be useful to the future teaching practice. In addition, the accompanying limitations as limited time or small sample size still invite more discussions and further research work. Especially researches on strategies need to be carried on. All the ideas of this paper should be practiced more in further work of teaching and continuously improved.