A Study On The Influence Of Listening Materials On Middle School Students' Listening Comprehension

With China's deepening reform and opening up to the outside world, the scale of English education becomes larger and larger and lots of significant achievements have also been made in it. But the current situation of English teaching in China still can't meet the demands of China's economic construction and the development of society. There is still a long way to go, compared with the requirement of the rapid development towards English, which is a key communication tool.Having studied English for years, many people still can't communicate in English with native speakers. They are at sea when hearing native English at normal speed. This phenomenon is caused by the teaching emphasis of the middle school English teachers. In the four language skills, the teachers only emphasize "writing". They only stress written exercises and the examination results, while "listening" is put aside and neglected. Thus lots of middle school students learn "deaf and dumb English", which means they can neither understand what others say nor can they speak English themselves. They only know how to get high marks in exams. With the increase of international communication and the adding of Listening Comprehension to National College Entrance Examination for English, the importance of English listening becomes more and more concerned. Special attention has been paid to listening. But the fact is that we spend a lot of time on listening practice, while the students' listening competence hasn't been facilitated at all. Therefore the subject how to improve middle school students' listening comprehension is well worth analyzing and studying.This thesis is trying to focus on various listening obstacles caused by listening materials from the perspectives of Cognitive Psychology and Krashen's Input Hypothesis. It also explores the reasons for it and gives some advice and methods for improvement of English listening teaching in middle schools.In chapter 1, the author presents the importance of English teaching by saying that listening practice is to improve students' listening comprehension so that they can communicate with others in English. Later the author introduces the problems existing in listening teaching in middle schools. And one of the most noticeable problems is lacking in variety of listening materials. In this case, the author offers countermeasures and raises the idea that proper listening materials are essential to the improvement of listening comprehension. Then the author analyzes and classifies the current situation of listening research at home and abroad. At last the author briefly introduces the structure of the thesis. In chapter two, the author introduces two theories and defines some key terms. First the author introduces Cognitive Psychology and Krashen's Input Hypothesis. Then she confirms the following four concepts: listening, listening comprehension, listening subskill and listening strategy. In the end of this chapter the author briefly introduces two listening comprehension models which are "bottom-up" and "top- down" processing models.In chapter three, the author analyzes the listening obstacles (of 100 students in senior I, No.2 Middle school of Wuhan.) caused by listening materials. First the author introduces the ways of doing the listening practicing experiment. Then the author analyzes, summarizes and classifies the collected results. In this chapter, the author clarifies a variety of listening obstacles caused by listening materials, laying the foundation of probing the reasons for them and suggesting strategies in response.In chapter four, the author first probes the complicated reasons for listening obstacles caused by listening materials and then suggests some strategies. The main reasons lie in negative transfer of their mother tongue, the limitation of the present listening teaching, their English level. Also the author advises the teachers to foster students listening subskills, use appropriate listening materials and change the present listening teaching ways.In chapter five, the author draws a conclusion and narrates the insufficiency and future efforts in the research. The author considers the research on the influence of listening materials on middle school students' listening comprehension to be available and advocates putting the countermeasures into practical use in listening teaching. Later the author further explains the complexity in listening comprehension, the limitation of relevant theory, the superficiality in the research and the dissatisfaction of some listening materials. At last, the author makes a future plan to testify the countermeasures.