A Study Of The Interactive Model For Teaching Listening Comprehension

Instead of being mere receptacles,listeners are now believed to actively reconstruct meaning through the interactive work in which they integrate what they listen with what they already know about the world. "The interactive model" is based on modern reading comprehension approach.The combination of "bottom-up" processing and "top-down" processing is called "interactive" processing. The bottom-up processing model assumes that listening is a process of decoding the sounds that one hears in a linear fashion,from the smallest meaning units (or phonemes) to complete texts. The alternative top-down processing model suggests that the listener actively reconstructs the original meaning of the speaker using incoming sounds as clues. In this reconstruction process,the listener uses prior knowledge of the text and situation within which the listening takes place to make sense of what he or she hears. It would be mistaken to see top-down and bottom-up strategies as somehow in opposition. It is now generally accepted that both function simultaneously and are mutually dependent. The current model of listening is therefore an interactive one in which linguistic information,contextual clues,and prior knowledge interact to enable comprehension.According to the questionnaire among 140 Senior One students,we know that the main problems in listening lie in lack of language knowledge, background knowledge, listening strategies and affective factors in language learning,especially in language knowledge and listening strategies.The whole program is divided into three periods. In the first period,we pay special attention to the bottom-up processing model. In the second period, we emphasize on the top-down processing model,and in the third period, we show great interest in the interactive processing model.The interactive model can effectively improve students'listening skill,strategies and affective factors in language learning.We hope this paper will be of some help to the upcoming researchers,English teaching and textbook compiling.