A Research And Strategies On Listening Barriers Of School Students

With the rapid economic development in China, English Language Teaching (ELT) is attracting more and more attention and becoming more and more important. Listening skill plays an important role in English integrative skills and more emphases is put on than ever before. The key to improve listening skill is English teaching revolution.In traditional listening-skill training, many English teachers thought that practicing listening as much as possible could improve students' listening skill. They regarded the listening comprehension as a passive process of receiving information. With this mistaken idea, listening skill training became listening exercises class. The teacher just played a record while students were doing listening exercises. The only communication between the teacher and the students was feeding back answers. There was no listening technique and strategy instructions in the listening class. With this kind of listening instruction, students would have barriers in communicating with native speakers even they could get a high score in English test.In the later of 20th century, with the world economy increasing and frequent world trade and travel, listening skills became more and more important, which reflected on the changes of English teaching. The direct English teaching, listening and oral English teaching, communicating English teaching, functional and idiom teaching and task-based English teaching shot up one after another, and all of them put their emphasis on listening skill. In later 1980s, English teaching in China began put its emphasis on training students listening skill. In 1999, listening was in the sight of NMET in China. English listening techniques and strategies broad students' way to learn English and improved the their integrative skills. English listening has been carried out in our country for nearly 20 years. The researcher paper wants to find out how English teachers instruct listening course and what barriers students meet in their listening course.Therefore, this paper aims at finding out the practical barriers when students do listening exercises and what insufficiency English teachers have when they instruct students English training, finding our the reasons and ways to solve the problems. The research questions to be addressed in the research paper are the following:1) What insufficiency do English teacher have when they instruct students to do listening exercises?2) How can English teachers supplement the insufficiency?3) What barriers do English teachers have when they instruct students to do listening exercises?4) What barriers do students have when they do listening exercises?5) What reasons lay behind these barriers?6) What method can help students to solve listening barriers?The subjects are 140 students from (19)(20) Grade One in Dangshan Senior School and 83 English teachers from all grades of Dangshan Senior School and No.2 Dangshan Senior SchoolThe information that forms the score of this research paper was obtained by means of three survey instruments: a teacher questionnaire and a student questionnaire, classroom observation, interview. The teacher questionnaire consists of 30 items and the students' questionnaire consists of 53 items; the classroom observation was carried out in (19)(20) Grade in Dangshan Senior School. The information collection and analysis are conducted in the paper. The major findings are summarized as follows:1) Most of the senior students do have listening barriers, which can be divided into three categories: the basic knowledge insufficiency, listening technique and strategies insufficiency and psychological problems.2) The teaching method on the basis of students' practical barriers has a better effect in English learners' listening achievements than the traditional teaching method.3) The listening instructions on techniques and strategies cannot solve all the barriers in English listening. Though the listening instructions on techniques and strategies can help students who have solid English knowledge basis to achieve high scores, it has little effect on the students who have weak knowledge basis to overcome the listening barriers, for the listening techniques and strategies is procedural knowledge and English knowledge is declarative knowledge. Without enough English knowledge, the instructions on listening techniques and strategies nearly have no effect at all.4) Listening instruction would be better together with speaking, reading and writing. It is better for English teachers to develop their own listening material according to their own students' English listening level. There should be varieties of listening material to activate students' English listening interest.The research also has some pedagogical implications:First, learning is not a one-way transmission or a passive process with the learners as the passive receivers. Learning is an active constructive process, in which learners' cognitive activities have to be taken into consideration. Therefore, teachers are supposed to work out effective ways to engage learners in the learning process. SecondLanguage teaching and learning not only involves the receiving or learning of language forms but also involves the activation of learners preexisting cultural knowledge. What is more important, it involves the reconstruction of such knowledge. Therefore teachers should take measures to make sure that learners learn the target language rules and the relevant schematic knowledge simultaneously.Listening teaching is both an old and a new course, as a new course, it is open to any choices and possibilities. In terms of the listening instruction, much remains to be developed and explored.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One makes a brief introduction about thesis description, practical significance and the structure of thesis. Chapter Two first introduces the definition of listening barriers of senior school students, then reviews the previous research on listening barriers, and finally followed by the theoretical bases for the study.Chapter Three (Theoretical framework), from different angles, shows the basis of listening theories.Chapter Four (Methodology) introduces the teaching methodology including objects, subjects, and data collection method.Chapter Five describes experimental procedure on experimental class.Chapter Six is a conclusion. It first covers the main findings of the research, implications of the research and limitations of the research; then it puts forward some recommendations for future application of listening instruction.Ending part consists of references and appendix...