How To Improve English Listening In Junior High Schools

Nowadays, with the system of the compulsory education being perfected, more and more migrant children enter the public schools. As a result, the schools begin to face a new challenge. But very little research work has been done in this area. This article makes an attempt at finding some solutions to some problems that are arising in classroom teaching with a focus on the English listening problems of the students in No. 26 High School in Suzhou, which accepts more and more migrant children with rather weak English listening ability. It has long been recognized that listening comprehension, as an input skill, is the foundation for the development of other language skills. The unfortunate fact is that the migrant children with hardly any listening practice in the past are weakest in English listening. It is imperative that English teachers in such High Schools as Suzhou No. 26 High School make thinking of their previous English teaching and actively probe into new listening teaching mode so as to improve the present situation. This article uses students in Suzhou No. 26 High School as research object. Integrated in this article are investigations into the factors which influence the students' listening practice by questionnaires and interviews in order to find out the differences in English listening among the students. It is the keystone of the article to analyze the obstacles of listening comprehension in English teaching and discuss the effective listening strategies so as to remove the barriers and enhance listening ability. It's important for the students to realize how important the English listening ability is and cooperate with the teachers to achieve satisfactory effect in their studies. And it's also important for the teachers to improve teaching techniques so as to get better teaching results.Teachers should encourage students to build up the confidence to overcome difficulties, preferably using modern multimedia to stimulate the interest of the students. In the course of listening teaching, phonetics teaching is essential because information is mainly delivered by organized sound. Teachers should also choose all kinds of listening materials such as essays, dialogues, stories and news so as to train the students' listening skills and strategies as guessing the meaning of new words from context, catching the main ideas, reasoning and predicting according to the known facts, and making notes, broadening vision and enriching background knowledge through English films and resources on Internet, etc. so as to initiate a new world of teaching listening in junior high schools.