A Study On Senior Middle School Students' Difficulties In Listening Comprehension And The Counter-measures

In spite of the great progress of the fundamental education of English in China, the conflict between English teaching and practical application of language has been becoming more and more intense since the resumption of the College Entrance Examination. In class, teachers of English have to slow down the speed of speech or repeat several times because of the students' poor listening ability, which results in low teaching efficiency. In addition, scores of the listening tests for students are not desirable. The difficulty to the general senior middle school students in listening is a bottleneck and deserves study and a breakthrough.Through an extensive survey among the senior high school students and study of related literature, the author found out the three key factors which badly interfere with students' listening of English. Student's difficulty in listening results from many-faceted factors, because the process of listening comprehension is very complicated which involves the listeners' physiological and psychological state. First, the traditional unitary teaching method uses tapes and recorders, and it doesn't provide any visual clues. It's very difficult to activate the students in listening class owing to the scarcity of vivid communicational surroundings. Passive acceptance of knowledge is easy to make the learners weary, and the fatigue may well ruin the efficiency of study. Second, listening comprehension is a process of decoding the received message. When a listener receives the sound waves from a speaker, he first recognizes the smallest unit—phonemes, then what phonemes to form syllables, then what syllables to form meaningful units, then draw the corresponding information from the long-term memory to match or rectify them so as to correctly understand and remember the materials. Whereas, because of the cancellation of the pronunciation test in College Entrance Examination, senior high school students pay little attention to pronunciation, which results in the incorrect pronunciation and even no phonetic forms of the words they have remembered in the mind. Besides, most students are not familiar with the forms of the appearance of sounds in speaking. These pronunciation problems lead to the difficulty in the students' listening comprehension. Third, due to the scarcity of background knowledge and limited experience of knowledge which can't be activated, the related schema can't take shape inmind. Without the help of the schema the prediction skill can't be applied in the listening process. Similarly, without the help of the schema framework, fragments of utterances in listening can't give rise to an integral understanding of the material, which makes the learning of the listening materials difficult.On the bases of related theories and the personal investigation, the author designs an experimental plan of listening teaching which lasts a term (sixteen weeks), taking into consideration the personal teaching experience and the practical condition of the school. According to the experimental plan I did the teaching experiment in the class I am teaching, involving the reform of the teaching aids, reinforcement of students' pronunciation learning and the learning of background knowledge.The author makes full use of the multimedia classroom to carry out the English listening teaching reform. The greatest advantage of the multimedia is to provide the students with ample perceptional comprehension through the interaction of sound and pictures and the cooperation of language and images. Therefore, the left hemisphere and the right one of the human brains can be fully exploited to enhance the efficiency of learning. Therefore, pronunciation is primarily essential to listening comprehension. The teaching experiment begins with a good command of phonemes, then the changes of sounds in the stream of tongue. At the same time the listening vocabulary of the students should be enlarged. The reinforcement and activation of cultural background knowledge will benefit the schema building which make the prediction and remembering skills available. Dictation training is properly applied to overcome the negative factors which cause the difficulty to the students. The experiment proves that the new teaching approach is scientific and feasible...