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The Application Of Affective Strategies To The English Listening Teaching In Secondary Schools

Posted on:2008-03-09Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:J ZhangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2167360215471757Subject:Subject teaching
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Listening in foreign language learning is one of the most basic and most important skills. It is one of the means by which people communicate with each other and the main way to access language information and language perception. Cele- Muroia M (1995) pointed out that the listening was a"complex dynamic and fragile process."Once any part of listening process is out of problem, it will lead to misunderstanding or even cause incomprehension. This process includes not only a cognitive process but also an emotional process. It is the organic unity of the cognitive process and the emotional process. However, the traditional teaching of the listening is nothing but to play the recorder, do exercises and check answers. Boring and stressful classroom atmosphere makes students feel depressed and response apathetically, and then lose listening interest and enthusiasm. Teachers are embarrassed and at a loss with such situation. Therefore, it is a challenge for experts and teachers to pay more attention to students'affective reflection and make every effort to do some research on how to improve students'listening effectively, vividly and objectively.In recent years, with the shift from teacher-centered class module into learner-centered teaching approach, studies on listening strategy become active, and many researchers try to improve learners listening proficiency through listening strategy training but the results differ. In China, according to Liu Renqing &Dai Manchun's (2003,ed) surveys on learning strategy, papers on listening training are rare to find ,and papers concerning how to carry out an affective strategy training on listening in secondary school settings are rarer. According to some research and the clarification of the learning strategies, the applied frequency of learning strategies is kept in such order with metacognitive strategies at the top and social/ affective strategies at the bottom. Thus, it is clear to see that teachers always neglect the affective strategies training in listening classes.American linguists Krashen claimed that: Input must be affected by students' affective factors such as motivation, attitude, anxiety and self-confidence which seem to be obstacles to the input. The greater the degree of the filter is, the less the message of the input will be absorbed by the students, and vice versa.Affective reflection determines the selection and destination of the cognitive process and impacts the following related action. Although the affective reflection is aroused by the assessment of cognition, it will strongly influence the perceptual processing, parsing, and utilization of one's utterance once it is produced. In other words, the current affective reflection plays a critical role in selecting, predicting, understanding and inferring the following cognitive information. This thesis has explored the monitoring role of affective strategies immersing in the three listening process with the purpose of helping the teachers to focus on students affective reflection , and ingeniously give students listening strategies training unconsciously. In this way, the students can promote the cognitive process from raw to ripeness, and keep their enthusiasm and interest in listening classes.This is an empirical study, at the beginning of the experiment, to assure the comparability of the two groups, the author had a survey on students'current affective attitude towards listening as well as the questionnaire survey on listening comprehension strategy, and then pre-test on listening comprehension level was held. The investigation presents that there exists a notably positive relationship between motivation and their listening achievement with particular reference to the cognitive and metacognitive strategies students use in English listening comprehension. The results of this study also revealed significant negative correlations among students anxiety, listening strategies, and their listening achievement which lend support to the premise that increased anxiety adversely affects student performance. As to empathy, the investigation also shows the positive correlation among the three aspects. The pre-test results show that there's no significant difference between two groups before the experiment. During the process of the sixteen-week experiment, two different teaching methods were applied to the listening classes, namely, Experimental Group is instructed with affective strategies-based approach, while Controlled Group is done with traditional method. At the end of the experiment, post-tests listening comprehension level were carried out. The related data and the results which contain pre-test and post-test and the questionnaire surveys on learners'affective attitude on learning English and listening comprehension strategy were listed and analyzed, and the results justified the author's hypotheses and the conclusion was drawn that the application of affective strategies to listening comprehension teaching in middle school can enhance the students'English level and excite the students' listening interest as well as help students use some listening strategies unconsciously.A key point worth emphasizing here is that the author who concentrates the affective strategies application in listening classes doesn't attempt to deny the significant part the cognition plays. On the contrary, she will strengthen the effect of the cognitions because affective reflections greatly impact the process of listening, and determine the result of listening comprehension. In a word, in the listening classes, teachers should take students'affective reflections seriously with maintaining and protecting their positive affect and diminishing their negative affect, and utilize the affective strategies into listening training to make the listening teaching more meaningful.
Keywords/Search Tags:English listening teaching, affective strategies, motivation anxiety, empathy
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