A Study On Senior Middle School Students' Difficulties In Listening Comprehension And The Counter-Measures

Among the four basic skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) in English study and applications, listening ranks the first. Listening takes up an extremely important position in general high school English teaching. We should strengthen students' capability of English listening comprehension. So, listening comprehension ability is a kind of human speech ability. It is in the catalogue of languages' knowing and comprehending and is the central link of improving linguistic communicative capacity. "Listening" is not only one of the basic ways to acquire linguistic knowledge but an important means to ensure language standardization and strengthen language practice. If we can strengthen and improve students' listening comprehension ability, we may help them enhance their interests in English study. As a result, we can stimulate English listening teaching of general high school. But in class, I found that not only the students' English listening ability is poor, but also the scores of the listening tests for students are not desirable. The difficulty to the general senior middle school students in listening is a bottleneck and deserves study and a breakthrough. What should we do to help them with their English study so that we can reach our teaching goals successfully?This study is conducted by using questionnaire, one of which is about students' difficulties in English listening and the other is about students' listening comprehension strategies and strategies used by English teachers in their English class. Students enrolled in five classes in No. 2 Senior Middle School of Optics Valley Wu Han participated in the study. The results show:(1) The four key factors which badly interfere with students' listening of English are poor pronunciation, lack of background knowledge, the traditional unitary teaching method and the scarcity of listening strategies.(2) The frequency on which students apply strategies isn't high (the mean of the total strategies is 2.9761) and belongs to the medium level. The frequency of use ranks as cognitive, metacognitive and social/affective strategies from high to low.(3) Most of the strategies used by students are the ones taught by teachers. Students' knowledge and application of the strategies mainly depend on teachers. The more learning strategies teachers teach, the more learning strategies students get, and the higher the frequency of use is.The results also show that English teacher should combine the teaching with strategy training, and be aimed at carrying out strategy training on studies by analyzing the characteristics of English learning, stimulate students to consciously adjust their listening strategies in their listening processes. Then they ask students to find out those strategies most suitable for themselves and to go further in improving their own metacognitive level and macro- and micro-regulating ability through reflecting on their own listening processes and effects. And by these actions students can approach their aims nearer and more efficiently.