On The Teaching Of English Listening And Speaking In Middle School

Hedge (2001) pointed out that the society is now shifting the communicative way from reading towards hearing. With the development of international communication, the students'ability to participate in the activities of communication, especially oral communication, is one of the several more recent concerns in English education nowadays. The Senior High School English curriculum Standards (Trial 2003) enacted by the Chinese Ministry of Education points out that foreign language teaching in senior middle school should"do good to the open-up and international communication of our country."Besides it puts forward a concrete requirement of listening and speaking skills which are used most frequently in communication. It means that students should"be able to understand the oral or written materials and can express their own opinions"and"be able to make use of every chance to communicate in English actually". (level 9 in the Standards)In actual oral communication, listening and speaking are integrated closely. To understand what others said and to express one's own idea is what people need to make communication go on smoothly. Hence, it is essential to integrate listening and speaking as a whole so as to form a reasonable mode of English listening and speaking teaching. However, few people in fact show great concern for it in English teaching, especially in the English teaching of middle school, so the author chooses it as an objective of study, intending to find out the factors that influence the process of from listening to understanding in the light of the previous studies and her teaching experience and, try to reduce the negative influence in the process of listening and speaking teaching so as to make the teaching and learning more effective.The theories of second language acquisition and cognitive psychology show that listening is a process of receiving language information, namely the process of language input. During listening, the perceived messages will be processed by the memorial mechanism, that is, the brain retrieve the vocabulary and build up the sentence structure, then decode the messages according to the syntax and vocabulary to form the semantic indicator so as to understand the messages, thus the messages will be kept in the long-term memory finally. Speaking is the process of expressing, namely the process of language output. When we want to express ourselves, we must first decide what to say, and then choose the proper words and sentences to transfer information to hearer. So listening and speaking are correlative but completely different processes in oral communication. They are the processes that restrict each other and promote each other as well.Inspired by those theories mentioned above, the author conducted an empirical study of listening and speaking teaching by means of observation, interview as well as investigation. The results of study show that: (1) Different materials can lead to different results in listening comprehension. During listening process students'attitude toward study, their learning interest and the anxiety are quite different. (2)The teaching methods used in the class will have direct effect on the learning strategies of students, especially for the middle school students. (3) Listening comprehension and retelling have close relationship. The results of listening will directly influence the results of retelling. It shows that listening comprehension is the pre-condition of speaking; listening offers information to the speaking while speaking will promote the listening comprehension. Those who do well in listening will have a good performance in speaking; and those who are good at speaking will be good at listening, too. (4) Speaking always contains rhythm and pronunciation and it is restricted by time for it is an extemporaneous movement. Besides, speaking is always neglected in classroom teaching. So a teaching pattern that integrates listening and speaking will be an effective way to improve students'listening and speaking abilities.What the study inspires us is that in English language teaching we should arouse effectively the listening interest of students to improve their listening comprehension. It is a good way to integrate teaching and learning, listening and speaking closely. Thus, we can design"double"learning tasks to activate students'motivation in learning, which are also fit for the basic teaching disciplines and the psychology of middle school students. What's more, we have already got full conditions to do it in middle school nowadays.