Improving English Listening Comprenhension Through The Application Of Phonetic Instruction In A Rural Senior High School

Listening is a crucial linguistic input for language learners, and listening ability ranks first in the skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and interpreting. However, listening is a learning task with many difficulties for learners in the rural districts. Most rural high school students often fail to process quickly enough the information they have heard. Hence, it is a hard task to improve their listening ability. This thesis discusses the initial stage of phonetic and listening teaching in Chinese rural high schools. Due to the limitations of the learning environment and the students'actual listening level, this thesis advocates a "Bottom-up" listening model, which re-consolidates the basis of student pronunciation, and lays emphasis on multi-strategic phonetic teaching, thus improving the students' listening level.Two hypotheses are proposed:1) targeted phonetic teaching can enhance rural students'level of pronunciation and speech recognition; and 2) the improved phonetic level can help to raise their listening comprehension capabilities. In order to validate these assumptions, the author has conducted an experiment in teaching fifty students, which is based on phonetic and listening teaching and has lasted one term in a suburban high school in the Jiangxi province. In the experimental class, multi--strategic phonetic teaching has been implemented and combined with listening instruction.After a semester's experiment, the data from the students'questionnaires, the pretest and post-test are analysed. The SPSS analysis shows targeted phonetic teaching can effectively improve the students'level of pronunciation and ability to distinguish sounds. It also proves that the listening scores of the experimental class have increased remarkably over those of the control class. Moreover, it enhances the students'self-confidence and initiative. Finally, the thesis summarizes the achievements of the experiment, expounds the feasibility of phonetic and listening teaching in rural high schools, and sets forth some suggestions on listening teaching stemming from phonetic instruction.